Get All Available Build Targets using CMake

When working with CMake, especially on larger projects, it's often helpful to know exactly what build targets are available. This is particularly useful when you want to build only a specific executable or inspect intermediate build steps without rebuilding everything. This tutorial demonstrates how to get all available build targets using CMake.

Here's an example of a minimal project defined in CMakeLists.txt file:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.27)
project(myapp)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)

add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} main.cpp)

Generate the build files by running:

cmake -S . -B build

Now, to list all possible build targets generated by CMake (including custom commands, executables, object files, and utility targets), we can run:

cmake --build build -t help

The output will look something like this:

The following are some of the valid targets for this Makefile:
... all (the default if no target is provided)
... clean
... depend
... edit_cache
... rebuild_cache
... myapp
... main.o
... main.i
... main.s