Introduction

The best way to use CMake is doing an out-of-source build by creating a directory like build/opt at the same level as the casacore directory. CMake mirrors the source directory structure in this build directory. In this way the source directory does not get polluted with object files, etc.
After the tests are built, they can be run using CTest and the results can be placed on a Dashboard.
Note that use of directories like build/opt and build/dbg is strongly recommended, because they automatically define the build type (see description of CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE below).

In the remainder of this page it is assumed that one is more or less familiar with the CMake system, although some background information is given.
cmake --help can be used to get help info.

The BuildInstructions page contains general info about how to obtain casacore and which external packages are required to build casacore.

Details

CMake is basically a configure step. A subsequent make command uses the Makefiles created by CMake.
Using the -DMODULE option it is possible to configure for a specific module, so Makefiles for only that module and the modules it depends on are generated. Furthermore it will not look for external packages the modules to build do not depend on.

Note that if a configure of the full package is done, it is still possible to build specific source files or modules by going to the correct directory in the build tree and run make in there.

The modules that can be given are:

Build options

The options to CMake are given using -D options. The following can be given:

It will be tested if readline and dlopen are available. If not, casacore is built without support for either of them.

Generating preprocessor output or assembler code

Sometimes it is useful to look at the output of the preprocessor or the assembler code generated by the compiler. This output can be generated for a particular source file like:

cd tables
make Tables/Table.i                    # preprocess Table.cc
less CMakeFiles/casa_tables.dir/Tables/Table.cc.i

Similarly, target .s can be used to create files containing assembler code.

Executing and checking tests

Test programs can be executed using the make test or the ctest command. If done in the build directory, all tests will be executed. By doing it in, say, tables/Tables/test, only the test programs in there will be executed. Using ctest's -R or -E options, specific tests can be selected or excluded.
A casacore test not only tests if a test program succeeds, it can also check if its output matches the expected output.
ctest will report about any failing test.

It is possible to run the tests through a tool like valgrind. It can be done by defining the environment variable CASACORE_CHECK. If defined and not blank, 0, no, or NO, its value will be used as a prefix to the command to execute.
A special value is 1, yes, or YES meaning that the script casacore_memcheck is used to execute valgrind's memcheck tool to check for errors, memory leaks and, open file descriptors. If problems are found, a summary is printed and the detailed valgrind output is written to the file <pgm>.checktool.valgrind. Thus the presence of such a file indicates that valgrind found some errors for test program pgm.
If a test uses a .run file, the .checktool.valgrind file can contain errors of multiple invocations of the test program.

Examples

Install to custom location making use of multi-core processor builds

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/casacore
make -j4 && make install

Statically link against wcslib

cmake -DWCSLIB_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libwcs.a ..