Boost

Use the default way to find boost in the official CMake documentation.

In practice

We need to look for boost and it’s components:

find_package(Boost REQUIRED COMPONENTS thread)

Then we need to link them to our targets:

target_link_library(my_lib Boost::boost Boost::thread)

Boost python

Boost python is a bit more annoying as it requires the version of python used on the system. Hence the search is a bit different:

# Find python
find_package(Python REQUIRED)
# Extract major/minor python version
string(REPLACE "." ";" VERSION_LIST ${PYTHONLIBS_VERSION_STRING})
list(GET VERSION_LIST 0 PYTHONLIBS_VERSION_MAJOR)
list(GET VERSION_LIST 1 PYTHONLIBS_VERSION_MINOR)
set(boost_python_name python${PYTHONLIBS_VERSION_MAJOR}.${PYTHONLIBS_VERSION_MINOR})
find_package(Boost COMPONENTS ${boost_python_name} REQUIRED)

And then link to it:

target_link_library(my_lib Boost::${boost_python_name})