Creating Swift Projects in CLion

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Swift is a modern language with a little teething trouble, but it is still worth a look. If you are like me and you do not want to work on a Mac if you can avoid it, your choices of development environments are rather limited at this point. Here, I explain how to create a Swift project with Jetbrains’ CLion, for which Jetbrains develops a Swift plugin.

Note bene: The need for this workaround may go away soon; Jetbrains plans to support the Swift workflow better.

We will create an application project, i. e. an executable, and version it with Git. You can drop all Git commands if you do not want that.

  1. Follow steps 1–4 from here; that is, install Swift, CLion, and the Swift plugin for CLion.

  2. We set up the project on the command line:

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    mkdir HelloWorld
cd HelloWorld
    
git init
git config user.name "Your Name"
git config user.email "your@mail.com"
    
swift package init --type executable
    
echo -e "cmake-build-debug\n.idea" >> .gitignore
git add * .gitignore
git commit -m "Initial commit"

    Initial folder content

    You may want to familiarize yourself with the Swift package manager; see here.

  3. Start CLion and import a project from sources; select folder HelloWorld and mark all files as project files.

  4. Delete all run configurations (Run > Edit Configurations…).

  5. Open CMakeLists.txt and replace the content with the following:

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    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.6)
project(HelloWorld)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)

set(SOURCEDIR Sources)
set(TESTDIR Tests)
set(BUILDDIR .build/debug)

file(GLOB_RECURSE SOURCE_FILES ${SOURCEDIR}/*.swift Package.swift)
file(GLOB_RECURSE TEST_FILES ${TESTDIR}/*.swift)

add_custom_target(Build
        COMMAND swift build -v
        BYPRODUCTS .build
        WORKING_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}
        SOURCES ${SOURCE_FILES})

add_custom_target(Test
        COMMAND swift test -v
        WORKING_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}
        SOURCES ${SOURCE_FILES} ${TEST_FILES}
        )

add_custom_target(Run
        WORKING_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}
        SOURCES ${SOURCE_FILES}
        )

    When the notification

    CMake project needs to be reloaded

    pops up, click “Enable Auto-Reload” to avoid confusion down the line.

  6. On the command-line, execute:

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    git add CMakeLists.txt
git commit -m "Adds CMakeLists"

  7. Run all the build configurations. CLion will complain that they have no executable set; select /bin/echo or a similar no-op for Build and Test, and .build/debug/HelloWorld for Run.

    The Build configuration

  8. Via the context menu in the project view, mark .build as “Excluded”, and Sources as “Project Sources and Headers”.

    The complete project

All done! Note that this is not perfect, though:

I appreciate any comments on how to improve this setup!

Creating Swift Projects in CLion - January 30, 2017 - Raphael Reitzig