cmakecppcheck

Cppcheck support in CMake

I am not asking about the various available third-party modules that support Cppcheck in one way or the other.

With CMake 3.10, CMake seems to have gained some official Cppcheck support. See CMAKE_<LANG>_CPPCHECK.

Unfortunately the documentation on how to use this variable is a bit sparse. Is there a good example of how Cppcheck is supposed to be used with CMake 3.10 (or later)?

Solution

  • An simple example would be - if you have cppcheck in your PATH and you are not specifying additional parameters - the following by setting global CMAKE_<LANG>_CPPCHECK variable:

    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10)

project(CppCheckTest)

file(
    WRITE "main.cpp"
[=[
int main()
{
    char a[10];
    a[10] = 0;
    return 0;
}
]=] 
)

set(CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK "cppcheck")
add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} "main.cpp")

    The files to scan are added automatically to the cppcheck command line. So the above example gives the following output (gcc and cppcheck on Linux system):

    # make
Scanning dependencies of target CppCheckTest
[ 50%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/CppCheckTest.dir/main.cpp.o
Checking .../CppCheckTest/main.cpp...
Warning: cppcheck reported diagnostics:
[/mnt/c/temp/StackOverflow/CppCheckTest/main.cpp:4]: (error) Array 'a[10]' accessed at index 10, which is out of bounds.
[100%] Linking CXX executable CppCheckTest
[100%] Built target CppCheckTest

    You could give cppcheck a try in an existing project by simply setting the CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK variable via the cmake command line:

    # cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK:FILEPATH=cppcheck ..

    A more "daily life" example would probably for you to include something like the following code snippet in your CMakeList.txt:

    find_program(CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK NAMES cppcheck)
if (CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK)
    list(
        APPEND CMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK 
            "--enable=warning"
            "--inconclusive"
            "--force" 
            "--inline-suppr"
            "--suppressions-list=${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/CppCheckSuppressions.txt"
    )
endif()

    References