How to set up googleTest as a shared library on Linux

Question

Debian does not provide any precompiled packages for gTest anymore. They suggest you integrate the framework into your project's makefile. But I want to keep my makefile clean. How do I set up gTest like the former versions (<1.6.0), so that I can link against the library?

Answer 1

Before you start make sure your have read and understood this note from Google! This tutorial makes using gtest easy, but may introduce nasty bugs.

1. Get the googletest framework

wget https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/release-1.8.0.tar.gz

Or get it by hand. I won't maintain this little How-to, so if you stumbled upon it and the links are outdated, feel free to edit it.

2. Unpack and build google test

tar xf release-1.8.0.tar.gz
cd googletest-release-1.8.0
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make

3. "Install" the headers and libs on your system.

This step might differ from distro to distro, so make sure you copy the headers and libs in the correct directory. I accomplished this by checking where Debians former gtest libs were located. But I'm sure there are better ways to do this. Note: make install is dangerous and not supported

sudo cp -a googletest/include/gtest /usr/include
sudo cp -a googlemock/gtest/libgtest_main.so googlemock/gtest/libgtest.so /usr/lib/

4. Update the cache of the linker

... and check if the GNU Linker knows the libs

sudo ldconfig -v | grep gtest

If the output looks like this:

libgtest.so.0 -> libgtest.so.0.0.0
libgtest_main.so.0 -> libgtest_main.so.0.0.0

then everything is fine.

gTestframework is now ready to use. Just don't forget to link your project against the library by setting -lgtest as linker flag and optionally, if you did not write your own test mainroutine, the explicit -lgtest_main flag.

From here on you might want to go to Googles documentation, and the old docs about the framework to learn how it works. Happy coding!

Edit: This works for OS X too! See "How to properly setup googleTest on OS X"