Boost installation on windows, libraries missing

Question

I am trying to build boost. I followed the instructions here. I create a folder C:\Boost which contains include and libs and I add it to my enviroment path. However, when I tried to build another project with cMake I am getting:

  CMake Error at C:/Program Files/CMake 2.8/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/FindBoost.cmake:1106 (message):
  Unable to find the requested Boost libraries.
  Boost version: 1.55.0

  Boost include path: C:/Boost/include/boost-1_55

  The following Boost libraries could not be found:

      boost_system
      boost_filesystem
      boost_signals

 No Boost libraries were found.  You may need to set BOOST_LIBRARYDIR to the
directory containing Boost libraries or BOOST_ROOT to the location of
Boost.
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:88 (find_package)

Any idea about those missing libs?

Answer 1

It's a bad thing to start an answer with a question, but I do it nevertheless:

• First, am I right in assuming that you've set an environment variable BOOST_ROOT pointing to C:\Boost? (Simply adding it to the path might not be sufficient here.)
• Second, which CMake generator are you running? Visual Studio, Makefile, ninja?

I've head a similar problem recently that was connected to the generator that I was actually using. More precisely, I was trying to create a Ninja project from within cmake-gui and got almost the same error message. However, I was able to create a Visual Studio project in cmake-gui project without problem.

When looking a little closer at the command output for the Ninja case I found the following two lines at the very beginning:

The C compiler identification is unknown
The CXX compiler identification is unknown

This hints at the actual problem. While it is clear which compiler will be in use for Visual Studio (9, 10, 11, ...), cmake cannot infer a default compiler for Ninja because it is a generic build system that runs with different compilers. In the end boost wasn't found because the compiler is unknown.

A simple solution was to open the Developer Command Prompt for the Visual Studio version that you want to run with. When you create the project in this "extended" command prompt CMake will be able to infer the correct compiler. Alternatively, you can set the CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER and CMAKE_C_COMPILER flags when running cmake.

cmake -G "Ninja" <path/to/CMakeLists.txt>
cmake -G "Ninja" <path/to/CMakeLists.txt> -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="path/to/cxx/compiler" -CMAKE_C_COMPILER="path/to/c/compiler"