I started trying to work on an open-source project and found that I needed to install googletest and googlemock on my home machine. Seemed easy enough, I found a package called google-mock in the Raring repositories which depends on a package called libgtest-dev. So I install it:

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$ sudo apt-get install -y google-mock

And the CMake file I was running before tells me that I have gmock, but I’m still missing gtest. What’s going on here?

Well, there was a changeset applied in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) with the following text (source):

Stop distributing static library (although still build it, to ensure gtest works). Upstream recommends against shipping the libary at all, just the source. (See: http://code.google.com/p/googletest/wiki/FAQ) The Debian maintainer plans to do this also (see BTS: 639795); do it in Ubuntu now to fulfil MIR requirements.

– Christopher James Halse Rogers Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:45:29 +1100

What does that mean? That means we get to build and “install” the gtest libs ourselves. The source is conveniently installed in /usr/src after installing libgtest-dev (which we automatically got when we installed google-mock).

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$ sudo apt-get install -y cmake --quiet
$ cd /usr/src/gtest
$ sudo cmake -E make_directory build
$ sudo cmake -E chdir build cmake .. >> /dev/null
$ sudo cmake --build build >> /dev/null
$ ls build/libgtest*
build/libgtest.a  build/libgtest_main.a
$ sudo cp build/libgtest* /usr/local/lib/
$ sudo rm -rf build

The >> /dev/null can be dropped if you would like to see the output of these commands when successful, any error text will still show up with this redirect in place. I like to move all my personally-compiled libraries (and includes) to /usr/local, but you could just as easily copy them over to /usr/lib. All of this could also be done in /tmp if you’re so inclined.