Catalog

A simple, powerful, versatile, and fast package manager for CMake.

Catalog manages your project's third-party dependencies without causing a mild aneurysm. It acts as a dynamic middleman for your build, wrapping system packages, prebuilt binaries, and raw source code into clean and consistant deps:: targets.

By using a decentralized recipe model, Catalog gives you the flexibility of a full package manager without any of the configuration-time bloat.

Why Catalog?

Different package managers prioritize different workflows. Catalog is designed for ease of use by combining dependencies from multiple sources depending on the system and configuration options. If you're project needs fully consistant builds, Catalog may not be the best pick (but it is fully capable of doing so).

• vs. CPM / FetchContent: Great for consistant and airtight builds, but relying entirely on downloading and compiling from source greatly increases configuration times. Catalog is fast because it checks for native system packages and prebuilts before resorting to a git clone.
• vs. vcpkg / Conan: Powerful, but monolithic. They require massive central registries, external binaries, and strict environment setups. Additionally they have little compatibility with cross-compilation. Catalog is lightweight, completely decentralized, and requires absolutely zero external binaries to work—it's just pure CMake.
• vs. Hunter: While Hunter is also pure CMake, it is heavily centralized and builds everything from source. Catalog decentralizes the recipe index and explicitly prioritizes faster resolution methods over source compilation.
• vs. Spack / Conda: Designed to build massive, isolated scientific stacks from the ground up, often bypassing the host OS entirely. Catalog respects your system, happily utilizing native package managers like pacman, apt, or brew to keep your workflow native.

Features

• 5-Stage Fallback Pipeline: Automatically tries to resolve dependencies in a logical order:
  1. Built-in toolchain packages (e.g. from Emscripten)
  2. Local System (via find_package, pkg-config, or similar)
  3. Native Package Manager (Pops an interactive prompt for apt, pacman, brew, etc.)
  4. Prebuilt Binaries (Direct tarball downloads for specific architectures, this is most commonly used for Windows)
  5. Source Compilation (Fallback source download and build)
• Toolchain Aware: Recipes can specify precise compiler flags and configurations for complex cross-compilation environments (like Emscripten, consoles, or specific architectures).
• Unified Targets: No matter how a library is resolved—whether it came from pacman, a prebuilt tarball, or was compiled from source, it always links to your project via a clean deps::library_name alias.
• Granular Control: Explicitly force source builds, disable prebuilts, or force system-level resolution on a per-dependency basis using standard CMake variables or global environment variables.

Documentation & Usage

For installation, usage, and recipe authoring instructions please visit our docs site:

Link to Documentation