running cmake commands in python script

Question

Is it possible to run cmake commands in a python script? I want to set the boost libraries which I installed and compiled manually through the python code.I want something like set(BOOST_INCLUDEDIR "/path/to/boost/include") to happen via python script. So, before running cmake I want the cmake variables to set through the python code.

Answer 1

There are two ways of pre-initialising CMake variables before CMake processing starts, both using command-line arguments of cmake.

The simple one is to pass one or more variables to CMake using the -D command-line option. Something like this:

cmake -DBOOST_INCLUDEDIR:PATH="/path/to/boost/include" ...

The other option is to create an "initial cache file" (basically a file containing just set(...) CMake commands) and pass that initial cache file to CMake using -C:

echo 'set(BOOST_INCLUDEDIR "/path/to/boost/include" CACHE PATH "")' > initial_cache.cmake
cmake -C initial_cache.cmake ...

This option is intended for use the first time CMake is run with a given binary directory, i.e. before it creates its own CMakeCache.txt file.

How you can utilise one or both of these from your Python script depends on your particular setup.