vs-dev-bootstrapper

What this project is NOT intended for

• Use as a general package manager. If all you want is a robust fully featured package manager for premier packages, I strongly suggest using vcpkg
• Cross platform package management. This is windows only, MSVC only
• Detailed customization, such as creating a vcxproj and controlling exactly which of the many dependencies you want it to know about, etc.
• Production code for large projects or "real" code bases that require a more advance and flexible build system

You should use this if

• You want a consistent, sane, easy organization of your own user-created src files/projects/etc across all slns you create
• You want to be able to create said sln with the click of a button, pulling down all dependencies from their github repos, and hooking them all up properly
• You want creating new vcxprojs and filters within your sln to be as simple as adding code to the Source/ dir

Table of Contents

• Setup
• Creating Your Solution Dir
• Generating the C++ solution file
• Adding Your Own Source Code to the VS Solution
• Creating Your Own Local Static Library

Setup

• This guide assumes you already have Visual Studio 2022 installed -- If you installed VS2022 in a different location than default you will have issues.
• Create an environment variable called PACKAGE_CACHE_PATH and set its value to the directory that you want dependencies downloaded to
• Make sure you have Python 3.11+ installed
• pip install dearpygui
• Make sure git is in your Path environment variable (C:/Program Files/Git/cmd is a common location)

Creating Your Solution Dir

Run bootstrapper.py which will bring up the UI

• Browse to where you want the Solution to generate
• Give the VS Solution a name
• Select your packages that you want and the version that you want them in
• Click Generate

Generating the C++ solution file

• Navigate to where you generated the solution

• Navigate to <your_sln_name>/Source/ and add some code, see "Adding your own src code" section to learn how.

• Double click run_package_manager.bat. This will open the same UI but in Update mode with a console window for log viewing

• Click Update

• Your .sln file should be created in the root dir, you're now all set!

Adding your own source code to the VS solution

• Your source code goes in <your_sln_name>/Source
• Top level directories in this folder will become projects of the same name within the solution file -- Directories inside will be added as vpaths in your project file so that your VS projects mirror your folder structure. -- All .cpp/.h files are added to its respective project
• All dependencies selected by the package manager will be hooked up for use in all projects

Creating your own local static library

• In the <your_sln_name>/Source dir create a folder called _static
• The rules inside this folder are the same as the ones in Source. Top level dirs become projects, etc
• It will be treated as a dependency in contrib and will be hooked up to all projects so they are ready to use it

Building

• To build the .sln you just finished generating, simply open in Visual Studio and hit build
• output libs and binaries are all organized in your build folder in their respective configurations

Including contrib packages in your projects

• From any project you should be able to access selected packages by including them like so:

#include <glm/glm.hpp>
#include <nlohmann/json.hpp>
#include <asio.hpp>
#include <spdlog/spdlog.h>
#include <catch2/catch.hpp>