A blank project example showing how to use libigl and cmake. Feel free and encouraged to copy or fork this project as a way of starting a new personal project using libigl.

Compile this project using the standard cmake routine:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

This should find and build the dependencies and create a example binary.

From within the build directory just issue:

./example

A glfw app should launch displaying a 3D cube.

This example project uses the igl::opengl::glfw::Viewer, therefore it requires the glfw module of libigl. This shows up in the CMakeLists.txt

igl_include(glfw)
…
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC igl::glfw)

Suppose you also wanted to use the triangle module in libigl. Then you would change these to

igl_include(glfw)
igl_include(restricted triangle)
…
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC igl::glfw igl_restricted::triangle)

The "restricted" appears in this case because the triangle library has a more restricted license than libigl. See other examples commented out in CMakeLists.txt.

The only dependencies are STL, Eigen, libigl and the dependencies of the igl::opengl::glfw::Viewer (OpenGL, glad and GLFW).

The CMake build system will automatically download libigl and its dependencies using CMake FetchContent, thus requiring no setup on your part.

You can use the CMake cache variable FETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_LIBIGL when configuring your CMake project for the first time to aim it at a local copy of libigl instead.

cmake -DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_LIBIGL=<path-to-libigl> ..

When changing this value, do not forget to clear your CMakeCache.txt, or to update the cache variable via cmake-gui or ccmake.