What happened to FindSDL2 in CMake?

Question

I use SDL2 in my game. I always was using custom FindSDL2.cmake, because there is no one in standard CMake set. However, some time ago posts about FindSDL2 did appeared. Example: Reddit post.

If your cmake is new enough and it has FindSDL2.cmake file, you can do this:

find_package(SDL2 REQUIRED)

But when I download latest CMake (3.13.2), it doesn't include FindSDL2.cmake.

What happened to it?

Can you show use your CMakeLists.txt? FindSDL2 is found in cmake 3.12.1 at least. — ShadowMitia, Jan 02 '19 at 12:11

Botje · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-13T14:42:31.250

12

FindSDL2 has never appeared in CMake. Following the reject reason in pull request #149, SDL2 ships with a SDL2Config.cmake, which provides a cmake package. The documentation for find_package states that find_package(SDL2) will behave as follows:

Look for FindSDL2.cmake, use that if it exists. (module mode)
Otherwise, use the information in SDL2Config.cmake or sdl2-config.cmake. (config mode)

In short, make sure that your SDL2 package has installed the SDL2Config.cmake file and that is on your CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. The documentation lists the exact paths and prefixes it looks under.

Once you managed to find_package(SDL2), the following targets are available for use in target_link_libraries:

SDL2::SDL2main
SDL2::SDL2
SDL2::SDL2-static

edited Mar 13 '23 at 14:42

answered Jan 02 '19 at 12:31

Botje

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In my Ubuntu I can only find `/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cmake/SDL2/sdl2-config.cmake`. – val - disappointed in SE Jan 02 '19 at 12:38
From the documentation: Given the name Foo, it looks for a file called `FooConfig.cmake` or `foo-config.cmake`. I added the second form to the answer as well. – Botje Jan 02 '19 at 13:12

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 17 '19 at 17:42

To easily integrate the SDL2 library, I developed cross-platform modern CMake modules for finding and using the SDL2 library as well as other related libraries:

SDL2: example, game example
SDL2_image: example
SDL2_ttf: example
SDL2_mixer: example
SDL2_net
SDL2_gfx: animation example

So the only things that you should do in order to integrate the SDL2 library are:

Clone SDL2 CMake modules inside your project:

git clone https://github.com/aminosbh/sdl2-cmake-modules cmake/sdl2

Add the following lines in your main CMakeLists.txt

list(APPEND CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/sdl2)
find_package(SDL2 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} SDL2::Main)

Note: If CMake didn't find the SDL2 library (in Windows), we can specify the CMake option SDL2_PATH as follows:

cmake .. -DSDL2_PATH="/path/to/sdl2"

For more details, please read the README.md file.
This is a list of SDL2 samples and projects: https://github.com/aminosbh/sdl-samples-and-projects

Apologises for asking here but your github and stackoverflow do not have PMs to message directly. Having issues setting the path for SDL2 ` -DSDL2_PATH=C:\Library\SDL2 -- Could NOT find . (missing: SDL2_LIBRARY) (found version "2.0.12") -- Found SDL2main: C:/Library/SDL2/lib/libSDL2main.a (found version "2.0.12") ` — user3220058, May 10 '20 at 12:11
The repo is updated 4 years ago, do they still work with latest SDL2 version? — Jeff, Apr 22 '23 at 18:28

What happened to FindSDL2 in CMake?

2 Answers2