How To Use Package Manager In C++ Windows

By -
C++ logo frow Wikipedia

The thing I like about coding in C and C++ is the low level stuff, and the simplicity. But this simplicity is also one of the things that makes C doesn’t seem to fit for rapid development applications. Although sure it depends on how experienced the programmer is, for someone who has been doing C/C++ for a while, it’s not gonna be much of a problem. 

But for beginner C and C++ like me, coming from higher level programming languages and tools, even small things like how to use a library for example the library that we are gonna use is cURL, are already big steps that it is already hard to handle quickly.

If you are someone like me, a C/C++ beginner and want to use this very useful Curl library, on Windows, here’s how you can use Curl or any other library.  In Linux based OS maybe it could be much more straightforward, because cURL is usually already included.

Now we can easily  use any libraries, thanks to VCPKG: a C++ package manager for Windows, and probably it can work on Linux, and macOS too. You can read more about VCPKG here the official repo https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg or from Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/vcpkg?view=msvc-160&viewFallbackFrom=vs-2017. 

This is how you are gonna use Vcpkg on visual studio code. 

1. We are going to build VCPKG from the source code, so make sure you have Visual studio build tools installed, if not you can read my previous aricle here. 

2. Now open x86 Native Tools command prompt and then clone vspkg source code and install.

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

3. After successfully building the vcpkg, you can add vcpkg.exe to PATH so vkpkg can be accessed anywhere.

4. Testing Cvpkg, for this example, we will try to use cURL library, a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library.

- Open command prompt or terminal

- Using Vcpkg search to search if curl is available

- Then install curl

cd your-project
vcpkg search curl
vcpkg install curl
vcpkg list
vcpkg integrate install

5. Now we are going to write a code to test if we successfully install a library using vcpkg, this example we are going to use a C/C++ project using CMAKE rather than Visual Studio Project or Nuget, so it can be cross platform, if you don’t know how to start creating a CMake project, you can read the previous article here.

6. So if you execute this install command again :

vcpkg install curl

It will tell you to put the code in your CMakeListst.txt like this:

find_package(CURL CONFIG REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(main PRIVATE CURL::libcurl)

So do what it tells, put the lines into your CMakeListst.txt, but change “main” with your project name.

7. Now under your-project/.vscode/settings.json, if you don’t have one, then create it manually, add this code to include our installed libraries.

"cmake.configureSettings": {
  "CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE": "your_vcpkg_path/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"
}

8. Ctrl + shift + p, find and execute, Cmake: delete cache and reconfigure

9. Now we can test by create a example code using library curl

Those are messy code but basically the code above will download a file or webpage from the internet and store it in our project directory.

In languages like Java, Javascript, Python or PHP, it is very easy to use package managers, I don't know why in C++ it’s like not always working, and the worst thing is it doesn't work for cross platform. So you still need to customize it if you are working in a different environment.

Java has Maven and Gradle, so Javascript with its NPM, Python PIP and PHP composer. Although C and C++ have cross platform CMAKE, it is still not very convenient to use. In the Windows visual studio, they have nuget, but again I've tried and it doesn't seem to work. Either it’s because I am inexperienced or those things are just not meant to be easy to use.

The higher level language like Javascript, you can just add “packageName”:”packageVersion” into package.json and it works after NPM install. To use it, you just need to import those packages like include in C++. In cMake however it’s not that straightforward and very confusing, unless you are very expert and have been doing C/C++ for a while, you are gonna end up wasting time on just how to include a library.

Programming in C may not be recommended to do the very quick changing and demanding nature of modern software development because C is usually used by low level codes to talk directly to the machine that is not covered by high level language. C is not suited for doing user interfaces for the end user kind of thing.

I am an experiences web developer, have a good problem-solving and deep understanding of software development principles. With comprehensive skill set in Java, PHP, Python, C and JavaScript. Able to do database thing like MySQL and Oracle. Along with expertise in frameworks like Spring, React, and Firebase. Have a solid understanding of software development methodologies, like Agile and Scrum. I applies best practices to ensure the development process is efficient and of the highest quality output.

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Kafka - how to use ReplyingKafkaTemplate send and reply synchronously

By -
Image
Microservice Spring with Apache Kafka Kafka is an asynchronous messaging queuing system, but when you have a case in your project that you need to have the result immediately from another service you can do that quite easily. Kafka from the client side produces a message to the server side, then waiting for the server to return back the message exactly what the client wants. It’s identified in the kafka header request named KafkaHeaders.CORRELATION_ID and a topic where the server should send. If the server side produces the same correlation id to the same topic in the request, then the client side will catch that message as its reply. Although you can work with kafka from a different framework and language other than Java and Spring. Here’s in this example i just specifically giving the example of sending and replying kafka messages using Spring Boot. The Project Overview The client-project will send a string message to the server-project over kafka, then the server-project wil
Read more

How To Connect SSH Using PEM Certificate On Windows

By -
Image
Usually you will need a pair of SSH username and password to connect to a remote server. But there's also another way to connect to the server via SSH but without password, just using a dot pem (example.pem) file. Here's how we usually do on Windows 1. Let’s SSH login using pem to confirm if it’s throwing error or the pem is fine, if error then we need to move to step 2 to fix it: ssh adam@10.0.0.123  -i server-cert.pem And here's the usual error that will throw if your pem file is not ready for SSH login. You need to follow the next step to make your pem certificate ready to login to your server via SSH. 2. Open Windows Explorer, then right-click on the pem file, then select "Properties". Navigate to the "Security" tab, and click "Advanced" 3. Disable inheritance 4. Delete all permissions, so it doesn’t have any permission 5. Now add you as the only only owner. By click button Add and then Select a principal, then Advanced. 6. On the showing p
Read more

ERROR 1348 Column Password Is Not Updatable When Updating MySQL Root Password

By -
Image
MySQL and MariaDB password As already mentioned in the title of this blog, this error message sometimes occurred when we are trying to update our root password database, either MySQL or MariaDB, The error says: ERROR 1348 (HY000): Column 'Password' is not updatable This is because if we use this SQL command to update our database root password, and it turn out to be Restricted by MySQL to use update on mysql database. UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('1234') WHERE User='root'; The solutions for MySQL Error1348 So you can not update a user password using Update commands, to update the password, use ALTER commands instead. like the following. ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '1234'; And then you need to do the flush privileges to commit previous queries (that alter command above) into the system, simply do like this. flush privileges; So now you have your root with password 1234. Although it is recommended to
Read more

Flutter Button With Left Align Text and Icon

By -
Image
flutter button left text Developing a flutter UI is very difficult for a beginner or I think any other technology it’s very intimidating for a starter. I remember my first time trying to make a button in Flutter that had left aligned text in it. I spent a lot of time on how to make it but never made it. Once you are getting familiar with flutter widget or component blocks, you can apply whatever style you want for your app. In html you can just do something like <button style=”text-align:left”>Text</button> but in flutter it is a bit tricky. So here I provide an example on how you can align text inside a flutter button to the left. Flutter button with left align text import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MyApp()); } class MyApp extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return MaterialApp( title: 'Flutter Demo', theme: ThemeData( primarySwatch: Colors.blue, visualDe
Read more

How To Create Spring Boot Project Using Netbeans

By -
Image
Spring Boot is program that you can use to develops Spring Framework easier, without the need of using so many hard to handle configuration. This tutorial, we are gonna create Spring Boot Application by using Netbeans IDE. You can of course create Spring Boot Appilcation on Netbeans, but it will be easier if just using plugin for Spring development in Netbeans, 1. Open Netbeans, click tools menu and click plugin. After plugin window opened, click tab Available Plugins and find the "Nb SpringBoot" plugin then install and activate the plugin. 2. After restarting the Netbeans IDE. Now you gonna be able to create a new project with Spring boot application. File > New Project > Under categories, choose Maven > then choose  Spring Boot Basic. Now you can start the development of spring boot application using your Netbeans IDE. Open pom.xml to add spring boot dependencies you want.
Read more