Cmake doesn't find Boost

Question

I'm trying to configure a project using CMake, but it fails to find Boost libraries even though they are in the specified folder. I have specified Boost_INCLUDE_DIR, Boost_LIBRARYDIR and BOOST_ROOT , but I still get an error saying that CMake is not able to find Boost. What could be the reason of such error?

Answer 1

I struggled with this problem for a while myself. It turned out that cmake was looking for Boost library files using Boost's naming convention, in which the library name is a function of the compiler version used to build it. Our Boost libraries were built using GCC 4.9.1, and that compiler version was in fact present on our system; however, GCC 4.4.7 also happened to be installed. As it happens, cmake's FindBoost.cmake script was auto-detecting the GCC 4.4.7 installation instead of the GCC 4.9.1 one, and thus was looking for Boost library files with "gcc44" in the file names, rather than "gcc49".

The simple fix was to force cmake to assume that GCC 4.9 was present, by setting Boost_COMPILER to "-gcc49" in CMakeLists.txt. With this change, FindBoost.cmake looked for, and found, my Boost library files.

Answer 2

If you are building your own boost do not forget to use the --layout=versioned otherwise the search for a particular version of library will fail

Answer 3

I had the same problem while trying to run make for a project after installing Boost version 1.66.0 on Ubuntu Trusty64. The error message was similar to (not exactly like) this one:

CMake Error at     
/usr/local/Cellar/cmake/3.3.2/share/cmake/Modules/FindBoost.cmake:1245 (message):
Unable to find the requested Boost libraries.
Boost version: 0.0.0
Boost include path: /usr/include
Detected version of Boost is too old.  Requested version was 1.36 (or newer).
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:10 (FIND_PACKAGE)

Boost was definitely installed, but CMake couldn't detect it. After spending plenty of time tinkering with paths and environmental variables, I eventually ended up checking cmake itself for options and found the following:

--check-system-vars        = Find problems with variable usage in system files

So I ran the following in the directory at issue:

sudo cmake --check-system-vars

which returned:

Also check system files when warning about unused and uninitialized variables.
-- Boost version: 1.66.0
-- Found the following Boost libraries:
--   system
--   filesystem
--   thread
--   date_time
--   chrono
--   regex
--   serialization
--   program_options
-- Found Git: /usr/bin/git
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /home/user/myproject

and resolved the issue.