How to Use CCache with CMake?

Question

I would like to do the following: If CCache is present in PATH, use "ccache g++" for compilation, else use g++. I tried writing a small my-cmake script containing

    CC="ccache gcc" CXX="ccache g++" cmake $*

but it does not seem to work (running make still does not use ccache; I checked this using CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE on).

Update:

As per this link I tried changing my script to

     cmake -D CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="ccache" -D CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ARG1="g++" -D CMAKE_C_COMPILER="ccache" -D CMAKE_C_COMPILER_ARG1="gcc" $*

but cmake bails out complaining that a test failed on using the compiler ccache (which can be expected).

Answer 1

It is now possible to specify ccache as a launcher for compile commands and link commands (since cmake 2.8.0). That works for Makefile and Ninja generator. To do this, just set the following properties :

find_program(CCACHE_FOUND ccache)
if(CCACHE_FOUND)
    set_property(GLOBAL PROPERTY RULE_LAUNCH_COMPILE ccache)
    set_property(GLOBAL PROPERTY RULE_LAUNCH_LINK ccache) # Less useful to do it for linking, see edit2
endif(CCACHE_FOUND)

It is also possible to set these properties only for specific directories or targets.

For Ninja, this is possible since version 3.4. For XCode, Craig Scott gives a workaround in his answer.

Edit : Thanks to uprego and Lekensteyn's comment, I edited the answer to check if ccache is available before using it as launcher and for which generators is it possible to use a compile launcher.

Edit2: @Emilio Cobos recommended to avoid doing that for the linking part as ccache doesn't improve linking speed and can mess with other types of cache like sccache