Getting Started with Modular Boost

Prerequisites

• Git command line client installed
• A C++ compiler installed

Choose a protocol for cloning

The ​Boost super-project and libraries on GitHub support cloning via HTTPS or SSH protocols. SSH is often used by developers, but HTTPS is preferable for those behind corporate firewalls. To use HTTPS instead of SSH, replace git@github.com:boostorg/boost.git in the examples below with https://github.com/boostorg/boost.git.

Authentication

The Boost super-project and libraries have been set up using relative URLs, so whichever protocol you use in the git clone command will determine how subsequent access to the super-project and libraries is authenticated.

Line endings

GitHub and other git repositories by convention often choose to store text-like files with lf line endings. Windows users will usually want git to automatically apply cr/lf line endings, and can request that like this:

git config --global core.autocrlf true

That sets the core.autocrlf option globally, so only needs to be done once.

Installing Modular Boost

From the command line on Windows:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:boostorg/boost.git modular-boost
cd modular-boost
.\bootstrap
.\b2 headers

Or, from the command line on POSIX-like operating systems:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:boostorg/boost.git modular-boost
cd modular-boost
./bootstrap.sh
./b2 headers

The b2 headers step creates the boost sub-directory hierarchy and populates it with links to the headers in the include sub-directories of the individual projects.

Experimenting

If you want to build the separately compiled Boost libraries, run the usual b2 command. For Windows, that would be:

.\b2

For POSIX-like systems, it is probably:

./b2

If b2 isn't already in your path, you might want to add it now.

Testing is done just the way it has always been done. For example,

cd libs/system/test
b2

should run the tests for Boost.system, all of which should pass.

Submodules

You might want to review the ​git submodule command at this point, since understanding how to work with submodules is critical to working with the modular Boost repositories.

Developing

Checking out a particular branch

The clone operation above leaves the individual libraries in the modular-boost local repository in a detached state that is not very useful and can result in data loss. So the first thing you want to do is switch a library you want to modify to the branch you want to work on. For example, if you want to do some maintenance on the develop branch of my-lib, do this:

cd libs/my-lib
git checkout develop

develop corresponds to svn trunk, and is the starting point for simple changes that do not justify creating a new branch.