[CMake] How to use Ninja on Windows with MSVC?

[Michael Jackson]

Do this all the time both for our CDash nightlies and when I am developing on Windows. The essential pieces of the puzzle are the following:

1: Ninja needs to be on your path
2: The compilers need to be on your path.

1 can be solved in a few different ways. The brute force is to edit the system path variable and place the folder containing Ninja into the system path. I do NOT recommend doing this. Repeat. DON'T DO IT. You can edit your "User" PATH environment variable and add to the PATH. This is the more recommended way but a bit tedious to get into that dialog box to adjust. We will come back to this..

For 2, use the "Visual Studio Command Prompt" which has all the paths to the compilers setup for you. Now the question becomes, how to combine 1 and 2. My own solution (which is far from optimal, but works) is that I setup my own "short cut" to a command prompt that launches my own custom .bat file that sits on my desktop. In that .bat file is basically a copy of the vcvarsall.bat file and then I add to that my own specific PATH values for things like Qt, hdf5, cmake, ninja that on located on my system. I keep both the shortcut and the .bat file on my desktop so all I need to do is double click to get a correctly configured command prompt for my dev environment. If a version of something changes I just edit the .bat file and I am ready to go. You can then also do "cmake-gui.exe ." from inside a build folder to have CMake-Gui launch with all the correctly identified compilers. 

I am happy to share the .bat file if you are interested. I have it updated for VS2017 at the moment but have been doing it this way since VS2013.

--
Michael Jackson | Owner, President
      BlueQuartz Software
[e] mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
[w] www.bluequartz.net <http://www.bluequartz.net>

On 5/22/19, 9:58 AM, "CMake on behalf of Robert Dailey" <cmake-bounces at cmake.org on behalf of rcdailey.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

    From the command line, I want to generate Ninja build scripts that
    utilize a specific version of MSVC compiler. Basically I'd like the
    combination of `-G"Visual Studio 15 2017"` with regards to its ability
    to find the C and C++ compiler on the system via registry/environment
    variables, and `-G"Ninja"` with regards to it being the build driver
    for that compiler.
    
    Is this even possible?
    --