FetchContent

For fully hermetic builds, pull swaggercpp directly from GitHub with CMake's FetchContent module.

Declaration

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.26)
project(my_app LANGUAGES CXX)

include(FetchContent)

FetchContent_Declare(
  swaggercpp
  GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/stescobedo92/swagger-cpp.git
  GIT_TAG        v0.2.1
)

# Silence tests/benchmarks/examples in the fetched build
set(SWAGGERCPP_BUILD_TESTS      OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE)
set(SWAGGERCPP_BUILD_BENCHMARKS OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE)
set(SWAGGERCPP_BUILD_EXAMPLES   OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE)

FetchContent_MakeAvailable(swaggercpp)

add_executable(my_app main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(my_app PRIVATE swaggercpp::swaggercpp)
target_compile_features(my_app PRIVATE cxx_std_23)

Transitive dependencies

swaggercpp itself does not fetch its dependencies. You must provide nlohmann_json, yaml-cpp, and httplib — typically via vcpkg or Conan alongside the FetchContent call.

find_package(nlohmann_json CONFIG REQUIRED)
find_package(yaml-cpp      CONFIG REQUIRED)
find_package(httplib       CONFIG REQUIRED)

TIP

A common pattern is to use vcpkg manifest mode for the three dependencies and FetchContent for swaggercpp itself, pinning a specific release tag to bypass the vcpkg baseline.

Pinning strategy

Pin by tag (v0.2.1), not by branch. Tags are immutable; branches move.

GIT_TAG v0.2.1

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
No package manager dependency	First configure pulls & compiles from source
Exact version pinned in CMake	You still need the three runtime deps elsewhere
Works in air-gapped environments (with mirror)	Longer clean builds than binary package reuse

See also

• Installation
• vcpkg
• CMake package