[CMake] Delaying building tests to "make test"

[Nils Gladitz]

On 02.03.2014 20:11, Pierre Bourdon wrote:
> To avoid increasing compilation time of my project I would like to
> only build tests when they are going to be run, for example when using
> "make test". Is there any easy way to do this with CMake?

You can prevent your test executables from always building by using the 
EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL flag in add_executable():
     add_executable(mytest EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL ...)

Then you can create a custom target:
     add_custom_target(build-my-tests)

And add your test executable targets as dependencies:
     add_dependencies(build-my-tests mytest)

Then you can run "make" to build everything except your tests and "make 
build-my-tests" to build the tests.

You could also add a command to your custom target to perform testing 
itself.

Nils