Binaries from server

Hunter has an internal mechanism that saves the binaries of installed packages along with meta-data about the toolchain, build options, and dependencies. This allows Hunter to avoid triggering the same build when a new root directory is created. For example, when a user changes the version of OpenSSL from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2 it will affect Config-ID, so a new root will be created. However, it will not affect how GTest builds (if it’s not a dependency), so the GTest archive can be unpacked from the local cache. The cache can be kept local or uploaded to a Hunter cache server.

See also

• Uploading to server

Details

The default server with cached binaries is cpp-pm/hunter-cache. Archives are saved as GitHub release assets and each is associated with a git tag. Available packages can be queried using an upload.* HTTP query from the GitHub branches URL:

• cpp-pm/hunter@upload.

Note that some toolchains may not work for specific packages. Check the status in the Travis CI job details. For example, Qt is broken for the iOS armv7s architecture, so we have to use the ios-*-wo-armv7s toolchains:

• https://travis-ci.org/cpp-pm/hunter/builds/140158080

Binaries/headers are stored in archives and archives are the result of packing the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX directory produced by the cmake --build _builds --target install command. The idea is similar to CPack functionality but is extended for non-CMake packages too.

> mkdir temp-dir
> cd temp-dir
[temp-dir]> wget https://github.com/cpp-pm/hunter-cache/releases/download/cache/aaee852f00aa3a2a884281e8920315a77fb14465.tar.bz2
[temp-dir]> tar xf aaee852f00aa3a2a884281e8920315a77fb14465.tar.bz2
[temp-dir]> ls include/gtest/gtest.h
include/gtest/gtest.h
[temp-dir]> ls lib/libgtest.a
lib/libgtest.a