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Setup

Tracker compatibility​

The Snowplow C++ Tracker has been built and tested using C++ 11 as a minimum.

Supported operating systems:

  • macOS
  • Windows
  • Linux

Installing in your project​

There are three ways to install the tracker in your app:

  1. By adding the project into your CMakeLists.txt as a subdirectory.
  2. By installing the project and importing it into your app using CMake's find_package command.
  3. By copying source files inside the include folder into your codebase.

As an imported target in your CMake project​

First, build and install the project. Make sure the project uses the external JSON libraries (SNOWPLOW_USE_EXTERNAL_JSON=ON). If you're building a static library (SNOWPLOW_USE_EXTERNAL_SQLITE=ON) you also need to use SQLite3 as an external library (SNOWPLOW_USE_EXTERNAL_SQLITE=ON).

If you have SQLite3, CURL or LibUUID available as system libraries but you need to use them from a different package (e.g. from Conan) you need to set CMAKE_FIND_PACKAGE_PREFER_CONFIG=ON to prevent linking to the system libraries.

cmake [...] -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=[...]
    -DSNOWPLOW_USE_EXTERNAL_JSON=ON -DSNOWPLOW_USE_EXTERNAL_SQLITE=ON \
    -DCMAKE_FIND_PACKAGE_PREFER_CONFIG=ON \
    -DSNOWPLOW_BUILD_TESTS=0 -DSNOWPLOW_BUILD_EXAMPLE=0 -DSNOWPLOW_BUILD_PERFORMANCE=0

After building and installing the project you can use find_package to import it into your CMakeLists.txt:

find_package(snowplow REQUIRED CONFIG)
...
target_link_libraries(your-target snowplow::snowplow)

Make sure your project finds the same dependencies what was visible for Snowplow when you were building and installing it. For example, if you have both system and local SQlite3 installations and CMAKE_FIND_PACKAGE_PREFER_CONFIG was ON for Snowplow but OFF for your project, Snowplow will be built with the local SQLite3 while during find_package(snowplow) in your project it will find the system one.

As a subdirectory in your CMake project​

Cmake version 3.15 or greater is required. You may add the library to your project target (your-target) using FetchContent like so:

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
    snowplow
    GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-cpp-tracker
    GIT_TAG        2.0.0
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(snowplow)
target_link_libraries(your-target snowplow)

Copying files to your project​

Download the most recent release from the releases section. Everything in the include folder will need to be included in your application.

The project has two dependencies that need to be included in your project: nlohmann/json and the amalgamated version of sqlite3. You will need to update the include paths in headers include/snowplow/thirdparty/json.hpp and include/snowplow/thirdparty/sqlite3.hpp.

Additional requirements under Linux​

Additionally, under Linux, the following libraries need to be installed:

  • curl (using apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev on Ubuntu)
  • uuid (using apt install uuid-dev on Ubuntu)