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 cl

Answer 1

If you happen to be using CMake, you can use ExternalProject_Add as described here.

This avoids you having to keep gtest source code in your repository, or installing it anywhere. It is downloaded and built in your build tree automatically.

Answer 2

This will build and install both gtest and gmock 1.7.0:

mkdir /tmp/googleTestMock
tar -xvf googletest-release-1.7.0.tar.gz -C /tmp/googleTestMock
tar -xvf googlemock-release-1.7.0.tar.gz -C /tmp/googleTestMock
cd /tmp/googleTestMock
mv googletest-release-1.7.0 gtest
cd googlemock-release-1.7.0
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make -j$(nproc)
sudo cp -a include/gmock /usr/include
sudo cp -a libgmock.so libgmock_main.so /usr/lib/
sudo cp -a ../gtest/include/gtest /usr/include
sudo cp -a gtest/libgtest.so gtest/libgtest_main.so /usr/lib/
sudo ldconfig

Answer 3

I was similarly underwhelmed by this situation and ended up making my own Ubuntu source packages for this. These source packages allow you to easily produce a binary package. They are based on the latest gtest & gmock source as of this post.

Google Test DEB Source Package

Google Mock DEB Source Package

To build the binary package do this:

tar -xzvf gtest-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd gtest-1.7.0
dpkg-source -x gtest_1.7.0-1.dsc
cd gtest-1.7.0
dpkg-buildpackage

It may tell you that you need some pre-requisite packages in which case you just need to apt-get install them. Apart from that, the built .deb binary packages should then be sitting in the parent directory.

For GMock, the process is the same.

As a side note, while not specific to my source packages, when linking gtest to your unit test, ensure that gtest is included first (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=156639) This seems like a common gotcha.

Answer 4

It took me a while to figure out this because the normal "make install" has been removed and I don't use cmake. Here is my experience to share. At work, I don't have root access on Linux, so I installed the Google test framework under my home directory: ~/usr/gtest/.

To install the package in ~/usr/gtest/ as shared libraries, together with sample build as well:

$ mkdir ~/temp
$ cd ~/temp
$ unzip gtest-1.7.0.zip 
$ cd gtest-1.7.0
$ mkdir mybuild
$ cd mybuild
$ cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON -Dgtest_build_samples=ON -G"Unix Makefiles" ..
$ make
$ cp -r ../include/gtest ~/usr/gtest/include/
$ cp lib*.so ~/usr/gtest/lib

To validate the installation, use the following test.c as a simple test example:

    #include <gtest/gtest.h>
    TEST(MathTest, TwoPlusTwoEqualsFour) {
        EXPECT_EQ(2 + 2, 4);
    }

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        ::testing::InitGoogleTest( &argc, argv );
        return RUN_ALL_TESTS();
    }

To compile:

    $ export GTEST_HOME=~/usr/gtest
    $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GTEST_HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    $ g++ -I $GTEST_HOME/include -L $GTEST_HOME/lib -lgtest -lgtest_main -lpthread test.cpp 

Answer 5

This answer from askubuntu is what worked for me. Seems simpler than other options an less error-prone, since it uses package libgtest-dev to get the sources and builds from there: https://askubuntu.com/questions/145887/why-no-library-files-installed-for-google-test?answertab=votes#tab-top

Please refer to that answer, but just as a shortcut I provide the steps here as well:

sudo apt-get install -y libgtest-dev
sudo apt-get install -y cmake
cd /usr/src/gtest
sudo cmake .
sudo make
sudo mv libg* /usr/lib/

After that, I could build my project which depends on gtest with no issues.

Answer 6

Just in case somebody else gets in the same situation like me yesterday (2016-06-22) and also does not succeed with the already posted approaches - on Lubuntu 14.04 it worked for me using the following chain of commands:

git clone https://github.com/google/googletest
cd googletest
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make
cd googlemock
sudo cp ./libgmock_main.so ./gtest/libgtest.so gtest/libgtest_main.so ./libgmock.so /usr/lib/
sudo ldconfig