Boost libraries - build only what I need

In step 5.2.4 of Getting Started you can instruct b2 which libraries to build:

./b2 --with-program_options --with-filesystem --with-system

Alternatively, use ./b2 --show-libraries to see a list of all libraries that are not header-only.

Following is an excerpt from the page:

In particular, to limit the amount of time spent building, you may be interested in:

• reviewing the list of library names with --show-libraries
• limiting which libraries get built with the --with-<library-name> or --without-<library-name> options
• choosing a specific build variant by adding release or debug to the command line.

Note: b2 command depends upon boost version so use following commands as per your boost version(Also, in this case use --with-libraries=<comma-seperated-library-names> version instead of --with-<library-name>):

• ./configure for 1.38.0 and earlier
• ./bootstrap.sh for 1.39.0 onwards till 1.46.0

These answers didn't work for me. On Windows, this worked for me:

b2.exe -with-LIBRARY

For example,

b2.exe -with-test

The BCP utility is a tool for extracting subsets of Boost. It's useful for Boost authors who want to distribute their library separately from Boost, and for Boost users who want to distribute a subset of Boost with their application.

The current version of Boost (1.50.0) uses Boost.Build. The new workflow for building BCP is as follows:

From the root Boost directory, type:

bootstrap.bat

Then, once Boost.Build has been built, type:

b2 tools/bcp

To extract, for example interprocess only, you could use:

$ mkdir /tmp/interprocess #bcp needs this
$ bcp interprocess /tmp/interprocess

This copies interprocess and its dependencies to /tmp/interprocess.