How to setup googleTest as a shared library on Lin

Question

Debian does not provide any precompiled packages for gTest anymore. They suggest you to integrate the framework into your projects makefile. But I want to keep my make file clean. How do I setup gTest like the former versions (<1.6.0), so that I can link aganist the library?

Answer 1

Before you start make sure your have read and understood this note from Google! This tutorial makes using gtest easy, but may introduce nasty bugs.

1. Get the googletest framework

wget https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/release-1.8.0.tar.gz

Or get it by hand. I won't maintain this little How-to, so if you stumbled upon it and the links are outdated, feel free to edit it.

2. Unpack and build google test

tar xf release-1.8.0.tar.gz
cd googletest-release-1.8.0
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make

3. "Install" the headers and libs on your system.

This step might differ from distro to distro, so make sure you copy the headers and libs in the correct directory. I accomplished this by checking where Debians former gtest libs were located. But I'm sure there are better ways to do this. Note: make install is dangerous and not supported

$ sudo cp -a include/gtest /usr/include
$ sudo cp -a libgtest_main.so libgtest.so /usr/lib/

4. Update the cache of the linker

... and check if the GNU Linker knows the libs

$ sudo ldconfig -v | grep gtest

If the output looks like this:

libgtest.so.0 -> libgtest.so.0.0.0
libgtest_main.so.0 -> libgtest_main.so.0.0.0

, everything is fine.

gTestframework is now ready to use. Just don't forget to link your project against the library by setting -lgtest as linker flag and optionally, if you did not write your own test mainroutine, the explicit -lgtest_main flag.

From here on you might want to go to Googles documentation about the framework to learn how it works. Happy coding!

Edit: This works for OS X too! See "How to properly setup googleTest on OS X"

Answer 2

Just in case somebody else gets in the same situation like me yesterday (2016-06-22) and also does not succeed with the already posted approaches - on Lubuntu 14.04 it worked for me using the following chain of commands:

git clone https://github.com/google/googletest
cd googletest
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make
cd googlemock
sudo cp ./libgmock_main.so ./gtest/libgtest.so gtest/libgtest_main.so ./libgmock.so /usr/lib/
sudo ldconfig

Answer 3

This will build and install both gtest and gmock 1.7.0:

mkdir /tmp/googleTestMock
tar -xvf googletest-release-1.7.0.tar.gz -C /tmp/googleTestMock
tar -xvf googlemock-release-1.7.0.tar.gz -C /tmp/googleTestMock
cd /tmp/googleTestMock
mv googletest-release-1.7.0 gtest
cd googlemock-release-1.7.0
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .
make -j$(nproc)
sudo cp -a include/gmock /usr/include
sudo cp -a libgmock.so libgmock_main.so /usr/lib/
sudo cp -a ../gtest/include/gtest /usr/include
sudo cp -a gtest/libgtest.so gtest/libgtest_main.so /usr/lib/
sudo ldconfig

Answer 4

This will install google test and mock library in Ubuntu/Debian based system:

sudo apt-get install google-mock

Tested in google cloud in debian based image.

Answer 5

This answer from askubuntu is what worked for me. Seems simpler than other options an less error-prone, since it uses package libgtest-dev to get the sources and builds from there: https://askubuntu.com/questions/145887/why-no-library-files-installed-for-google-test?answertab=votes#tab-top

Please refer to that answer, but just as a shortcut I provide the steps here as well:

sudo apt-get install -y libgtest-dev
sudo apt-get install -y cmake
cd /usr/src/gtest
sudo cmake .
sudo make
sudo mv libg* /usr/lib/

After that, I could build my project which depends on gtest with no issues.

Answer 6

It took me a while to figure out this because the normal "make install" has been removed and I don't use cmake. Here is my experience to share. At work, I don't have root access on Linux, so I installed the Google test framework under my home directory: ~/usr/gtest/.

To install the package in ~/usr/gtest/ as shared libraries, together with sample build as well:

$ mkdir ~/temp
$ cd ~/temp
$ unzip gtest-1.7.0.zip 
$ cd gtest-1.7.0
$ mkdir mybuild
$ cd mybuild
$ cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON -Dgtest_build_samples=ON -G"Unix Makefiles" ..
$ make
$ cp -r ../include/gtest ~/usr/gtest/include/
$ cp lib*.so ~/usr/gtest/lib

To validate the installation, use the following test.c as a simple test example:

    #include <gtest/gtest.h>
    TEST(MathTest, TwoPlusTwoEqualsFour) {
        EXPECT_EQ(2 + 2, 4);
    }

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        ::testing::InitGoogleTest( &argc, argv );
        return RUN_ALL_TESTS();
    }

To compile:

    $ export GTEST_HOME=~/usr/gtest
    $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GTEST_HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    $ g++ -I $GTEST_HOME/include -L $GTEST_HOME/lib -lgtest -lgtest_main -lpthread test.cpp