Welcome to C++ Project Cookiecutter!

This repository is a template repository (a cookiecutter) that allows you to quickly set up new CMake-based C++ projects. If you are new to C++ and CMake, you might want to checkout our simpler C++ template repository.

Features

The core features of our C++ Cookiecutter in a nutshell:

• Very simple, configurable setup of a fully functional C++ project
• Modern CMake implementation based on targets
• Choose and add a license and copyright statement to your project
• Ready-to-use integration with the Github Actions and Gitlab CI
• Generation and deployment of Sphinx-based documentation for Read the Docs
• Building a Doxygen documentation
• Setup of Python bindings with Pybind11
• CI-based deployment of Python wheels to PyPI
• Generated pre-commit configuration is added if you have pre-commit installed
• Integration with coverage testing from codecov.io
• Integration with code quality analysis from sonarcloud.io
• Based on an established tool: Cookiecutter has >15k stars on Github!

Prerequisites

In order to use this C++ Project Cookiecutter you need the following software installed:

• Python >= 3.6
• Cookiecutter >=2.1 e.g. by doing pip install cookiecutter.
• Git >= 1.8.2

In addition, the project that is generated from this cookiecutter will require the following software:

• A C++ compiler, e.g. g++ or clang++
• CMake >= 3.9
• Doxygen (optional, but recommended)

Using C++ Project Cookiecutter

Simply run the cookiecutter command line interface:

cookiecutter gh:ssciwr/cookiecutter-cpp-project

This will start an interactive prompt that will configure and generate your project. One of the prompts will ask you for a remote repository URL, so you should head to the Git hosting service of your choice and add a new empty repository e.g. on Github.

Configuration

This cookiecutter accepts the following configuration options:

• project_name: The human-readable name of the project, defaults to My C++ Project
• remote_url: The remote URL for the newly created repository. This is not only used to add it as a remote to the Git repository, but also to enable integration with some services. Defaults to None although we strongly advise you to specify it.
• project_slug: This will be the name of the generated directory. By default, it is deduced from the specified remote URL and the given project name.
• full_name: Author name, defaults to Your Name
• license adds a license file to the repository. It can be chosen from MIT (default), BSD-2, GPL-3.0, LGPL-3.0 or it can be omitted.
• use_submodules: Whether git submodule should be used to add version-pinned external dependencies (like e.g. the testing framework Catch2). If you do not know what git submodules are, you should select No.
• header_only: Whether the C++ project is header-only. If No is selected, a library will be added to the project. In both cases, a target is exported that dependent projects can link against.
• external_dependency: The name of an external dependency of your library. Defaults to None. This will generate the required CMake code for handling of external dependencies. Note that this support will typically not work straight away, as it highly depends on the dependency. See the generated TODO list for hints at what to do. If you have multiple external dependencies add one of them here and then manually add the other ones analoguously.
• github_actions_ci: Whether to add a CI workflow for Github Actions
• gitlab_ci: Whether to add a CI workflow for GitLab CI
• readthedocs: Whether to create a Sphinx-documentation that can automatically be deployed to readthedocs.org
• doxygen: Whether a Doxygen documentation should be extracted from the project
• cxx_minimum_standard: The minimum C++ standard required for this project. It can be chosen from 11 (default), 14, 17 and 20. C++03 and earlier are not supported, because the generated project will depend on libraries that require C++11 (Catch2 for testing and pybind11 for potential Python bindings).
• python_bindings: Whether to automatically add a PyBind11-based Python binding package.
• pypi_release: Whether to add an automatic PyPI deploy workflow to the CI system. This is currently limited to Github Actions CI as it provides cloud-based runners for all relevant platforms (Linux, MacOS, Windows). A PyPI release is automatically triggered when a release is generated in the Github UI.
• codecovio: Whether an automatic integration with coverage checking from codecov.io should be set up. This requires an Open Source license in order to be free to use.
• sonarcloud: Whether an automatic integration with code quality analysis from sonarcloud.io should be set up. Sonarcloud requires an Open Source license in order to be free to use. This feature requires a bit of setup, but will give you access to a very powerful code analysis tool. Currently, we only support SonarCloud analysis in combination with Github Actions CI and a Github remote repository.

If you are using cookiecutter-cpp-project a lot, you can customize your default values by providing a .cookiecutterrc file in your home directory, for more details see the cookiecutter documentation.

Issues

Please report any issues you might have with template using the Github issue tracker