Nonsystem Boost

(Accurate as of boost 1.47.0)

If you want to build against nonsystem boost (i.e. boost that isn’t available as a package) on linux, you need to use specific build flags, so that boost’s uniquely cantankerous build system generates files that cmake’s find_package() can find. First you run the included bootstrap.sh, then run bjam like this:

./bjam threading=multi link=shared runtime-link=shared --layout=tagged install

If you’re on ubuntu I recommend using checkinstall for easy removal of the package if you get things wrong. Example:

sudo checkinstall ./bjam threading=multi link=shared runtime-link=shared -j8 --layout=tagged --prefix=/usr/local/boost-1.40.0 install

Checkinstall will ask for a summary and such. Be sure to check that the autogenerated name of the package is reasonable (item 3 below):

*****************************************
**** Debian package creation selected ***
*****************************************

*** Warning: The package name "boost_1_40_0" contains illegal
*** Warning: characters. dpkg might not like that so I changed
*** Warning: them to dashes.

This package will be built according to these values:

0 -  Maintainer: [ root@bsq ]
1 -  Summary: [ boost 1.40.0 in /usr/local/boost-1.40.0 ]
2 -  Name:    [ boost-1-40-0 ]
3 -  Version: [ 20110926 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ boost_1_40_0 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ boost-1-40-0 ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

Enter a number to change any of them or press ENTER to continue:

With boost, checkinstall figures out a reasonable package name due to the name of the directory that the boost tarball unpacks to. With others it can get it wrong... tmp is a terrible name for a package.

When you then want to detect this new boost when running cmake, use BOOST_ROOT (see also the cmake docs for FindBoost), e.g.:

cmake ../src -DBOOST_ROOT=/usr/local/boost-1.40.0