Overview

CMake is a cross-platform, open source build system generator, commonly used to build C++ projects in a platform-independent manner. CMake supports GNU make as well as Microsoft Visual Studio.

Although CMake is an Open Source project, you don't need to download the source code and build it. Instead you can simply download one of the binary builds, which is a much simpler process.

Installing CMake on Linux

To install CMake on Debian-based Linux, execute:

sudo apt-get install cmake

Other distributions of Linux are likely to have a similar CMake package available through their respective package managers as well.

Installing CMake on other platforms

You can download CMake binaries from

• CMake Download Page

Choose the one appropriate for your platform.

On Windows, during installation, select the "Add CMake to the system PATH for all users" option to ensure that Bio-Formats build system can find your CMake executable. Once installed, new Command Prompts will recognize "cmake" and "cmake-gui" as valid commands.