There are several ways to install CMake, depending on your platform.

Windows

There is a pre-compiled binary available on the Download page. It is provided as an executable installer. One may also download and build CMake from source. The download page also provides source releases and instructions for CVS access.

In order to build CMake from a source tree, you must first install the latest binary version of CMake because it is used for building the source tree. Once the binary is installed, run it on CMake as you would any other project. Typically this means selecting CMake as the Source directory and then selecting a binary directory for the resulting executables.

Linux, Mac OSX, UNIX & Cygwin

There are pre-compiled binaries available on the Download page for many UNIX platforms.

    There are several possible approaches for building CMake from a source tree:

  • If there is no existing CMake installation, a bootstrap script is provided:
        ./bootstrap
        make
        make install
    (Note: the make install step is optional, cmake will run from the build directory.)

  • An existing CMake installation can be used to build a new version:
        cmake .
        make
        make install
    (Note: the make install step is optional, cmake will run from the build directory.)

  • On UNIX, if you are not using the GNU C++ compiler, you need to tell the bootstrap which compiler you want to use. This is done by setting the environment variables CC and CXX before running configure. For example on the SGI with the 7.3X compiler, you build like this:
        (setenv CXX CC; setenv CC cc; ./bootstrap)
        make
        make install 
    
  • For more options with bootstrap, run ./bootstrap --help