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
• 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 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.
• 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