Building CMocka as a Static Library

26 October 2017 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 30 August 2023

I had to rebuild CMocka the other day for one of my projects, and I was initially pretty confused as to why the CMocka build system was only generating dynamic libraries. The documentation didn’t mention anything obvious about static libraries either.

I’m still new to CMake and wasn’t aware of the DefineOptions.cmake file, which clearly indicates the static library option. Instead I poked around and discovered the WITH_STATIC_LIB option had to be defined in order for a static library to be generated.

For others who may also be confused, simply define the WITH_STATIC_LIB option during the initial cmake build step:

cmake ../ -DWITH_STATIC_LIB=true

2023 Update

The option has since changed to BUILD_SHARED_LIBS with the opposite polarity:

cmake ../ -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF

Happy hacking!