Releasing projects - What to do when I have finished with my C++ project in Eclipse?

Question

I have finished with my "Study Timer" project which I had developed in c++ using SDL and an eclipse IDE but I am new to Eclipse and I would like to know about a way to get Eclipse to produce a new package out of my project which i can directly supply to the end user (similar to how a .swf file is created after publishing a Flash project) that does not contain the various files and folders required only for compilation!.

Specifically:

I have many files and folders in my project that are necessary for development but not for execution!

For example, my project contains: src/ , headers/ , images/ , fonts/ ,Debug/ (contains the actual exe file) , other dll files required to compile and run...

But for execution, I only need the Debug/ , images/ , and Fonts/ !

Is there a way by which Eclipse can automatically generate a clean finished project that can be supplied to the end user?

Is is possible to produce a new executable file that is not dependant on the images and fonts folder but rather have them embedded to produce a larger .exe file (similar to a .swf that contains all the dependant media)?

Answer 1

For a C++ project in order to deploy it to end-users, you just need the executable(s) applications plus any system-specific dependencies (you can inspect them with Dependency Walker and find the installer for the redistributables or package them along with your app). Notice that C++ executables are NOT portable across platforms, so if you compile an exe file for Windows, it will NOT run on Linux or Mac.

Then you might need an installer to deploy everything and install it (if install is needed at all) into another user's system:

A free and easy to use one: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

A professional and opensource not-so-easy-to-use one: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

A commercial professional one: http://www.installshield.com/

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Not sure: if you're asking for "what should I give the users from my Eclipse C++ project?" then you should give them a Release version of your application. Release means "optimized and without debugging aid", it will almost surely be faster and smaller than your Debug-folder executable. Then package it as I described above.

In Eclipse you can switch to "Release" (assuming a standard C/C++ Eclipse IDE) from

Build Configurations->Set Active->Release

As already stated, a Release version doesn't contain debugging code (useless for an end-user and even potentially dangerous if you have code that you would like users not to know anything about), it is optimized (debugging code is easier to read even in assembly mode and easier to analyze for bug trackings) and thus the executable is often way smaller in size.

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After question update: for your executable to use embedded resources (i.e. reference things inside its own binary executable rather than relying on outsie files) you need a resource file to include and link into your executable. This depends on the compiler as well (Eclipse is an IDE, something that helps you writing code but it's not the program that really creates your exe file.. something that lies under the hood of Eclipse and to which Eclipse "communicate" what to generate).