What happened to FindSDL2 in CMake?

Question

I use SDL2 in my game. I always was using custom FindSDL2.cmake, because there is no one in standard CMake set. However, some time ago posts about FindSDL2 did appeared. Example: Reddit post.

If your cmake is new enough and it has FindSDL2.cmake file, you can do this:

find_package(SDL2 REQUIRED)

But when I download latest CMake (3.13.2), it doesn't include FindSDL2.cmake.

What happened to it?

Answer 1

FindSDL2 has never appeared in CMake. Following the reject reason in pull request #149, SDL2 ships with a SDL2Config.cmake, which provides a cmake package. The documentation for find_package states that find_package(SDL2) will behave as follows:

• Look for FindSDL2.cmake, use that if it exists. (module mode)
• Otherwise, use the information in SDL2Config.cmake or sdl2-config.cmake. (config mode)

In short, make sure that your SDL2 package has installed the SDL2Config.cmake file and that is on your CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. The documentation lists the exact paths and prefixes it looks under.

Answer 2

To easily integrate the SDL2 library, I developed cross-platform modern CMake modules for finding and using the SDL2 library as well as other related libraries:

• SDL2: example, game example
• SDL2_image: example
• SDL2_ttf: example
• SDL2_mixer: example
• SDL2_net
• SDL2_gfx: animation example

So the only things that you should do in order to integrate the SDL2 library are:

1. Clone SDL2 CMake modules inside your project:

git clone https://github.com/aminosbh/sdl2-cmake-modules cmake/sdl2

2. Add the following lines in your main CMakeLists.txt

list(APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/sdl2)
find_package(SDL2 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} SDL2::Main)

Note: If CMake didn't find the SDL2 library (in Windows), we can specify the CMake option SDL2_PATH as follows:

cmake .. -DSDL2_PATH="/path/to/sdl2"

For more details, please read the README.md file.
This is a list of SDL2 samples and projects: https://github.com/aminosbh/sdl-samples-and-projects