I am learning boost and want to make a http server using Beast and Asio, but i don't want to drag the whole boost library within my project.
What i did so far: added Boost.Beast and Boost.Asio as submodules from github repos, include them into my project and define BOOST_ASIO_STANDALONE.
Of course it doesn't build and missing a lot of files.
So my question is: can it be done? what parts of boost must be included to make this work?
Beast does not have a standalone mode: you need boost. As with any boost library you can try to excise the subset using the BCP tool.
However, depending on the task you will end up dragging in a lot of dependencies. The only positive part here is that Beast is header-only, so any savings actually reduce the size of the dependency.
I'd suggest BCP is rarely worth it, except for very isolated things. Say, if you want to have just boost::container::flat_map or just boost::core::string_view.