cmake - find_library - custom library location

The simplest solution may be to add HINTS to each find_* request.

For example:

find_library(CURL_LIBRARY
    NAMES curl curllib libcurl_imp curllib_static
    HINTS "${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH}/curl/lib"
)

For Boost I would strongly recommend using the FindBoost standard module and setting the BOOST_DIR variable to point to your Boost libraries.

I saw that two people put that question to their favorites so I will try to answer the solution which works for me: Instead of using find modules I'm writing configuration files for all libraries which are installed. Those files are extremly simple and can also be used to set non-standard variables. CMake will (at least on windows) search for those configuration files in

CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH/<<package_name>>-<<version>>/<<package_name>>-config.cmake

(which can be set through an environment variable). So for example the boost configuration is in the path

CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH/boost-1_50/boost-config.cmake

In that configuration you can set variables. My config file for boost looks like that:

set(boost_INCLUDE_DIRS ${boost_DIR}/include)
set(boost_LIBRARY_DIR ${boost_DIR}/lib)
foreach(component ${boost_FIND_COMPONENTS}) 
    set(boost_LIBRARIES ${boost_LIBRARIES} debug ${boost_LIBRARY_DIR}/libboost_${component}-vc110-mt-gd-1_50.lib)
    set(boost_LIBRARIES ${boost_LIBRARIES} optimized ${boost_LIBRARY_DIR}/libboost_${component}-vc110-mt-1_50.lib)
endforeach()
add_definitions( -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0501 )

Pretty straight forward + it's possible to shrink the size of the config files even more when you write some helper functions. The only issue I have with this setup is that I havn't found a way to give config files a priority over find modules - so you need to remove the find modules.

Hope this this is helpful for other people.

Use CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH by adding multiple paths (separated by semicolons and no white spaces). You can set it as an environmental variable to avoid having absolute paths in your cmake configuration files

Notice that cmake will look for config file in any of the following folders where is any of the path in CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH and name is the name of the library you are looking for

<prefix>/                                               (W)
<prefix>/(cmake|CMake)/                                 (W)
<prefix>/<name>*/                                       (W)
<prefix>/<name>*/(cmake|CMake)/                         (W)
<prefix>/(lib/<arch>|lib|share)/cmake/<name>*/          (U)
<prefix>/(lib/<arch>|lib|share)/<name>*/                (U)
<prefix>/(lib/<arch>|lib|share)/<name>*/(cmake|CMake)/  (U)

In your case you need to add to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH the following two paths:

D:/develop/cmake/libs/libA;D:/develop/cmake/libB

cmake - find_library - custom library location

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