CMake version recommendations and install

March 18, 2026

Downloading the latest release of CMake is usually easy. Admin / sudo is not required.

For platforms where CMake binaries aren’t easily available, build CMake using scripts/build_cmake.cmake.

CMake 4.3 additions include:

Common Package Specification (CPS) officially supported. This provides a solution for the long-standing program of build system-agnostic JSON package configuration files, which can be generated by CMake’s install(EXPORT) and consumable by other build systems.
cmake --version=json-v1 tells details of the libraries vendored into CMake, which is useful for debugging and reporting issues with CMake’s bundled dependencies. This is complementary to cmake -E capabilities which reports specific capabilities of the CMake.
CMake command line and archive create commands can specify compression level and algorithm in more detail
numerous generator string expressions were added

CMake 4.2 additions include:

Visual Studio 18 2026 generator.
FASTBuild generator has impressive benchmarks. FASTBuild supports more modern platforms including Windows, versus ccache or distcc.
ExternalProject added options to modify environment variables at each step by CONFIGURE_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, INSTALL_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION, TEST_ENVIRONMENT_MODIFICATION
Target property SPDX_LICENSE

CMake 4.1 additions include:

project() added COMPAT_VERSION that propagates to subdirectories and can be queried for the top-level COMPAT_VERSION.

CMake 4.0 additions include:

CMAKE_LINK_WARNING_AS_ERROR boolean option sets most compilers to error if a compile warning occurs, which is generally a good setting for CI systems.
target_link_libraries() can use a LINKER: prefix to abstract options.
CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM allows a user or project to call other projects that haven’t been updated to a newer CMake minimum version.
SARIF output allows IDEs to better parse build status.
CTest –interactive-debug-mode is particularly useful on Windows to enable debug dumps and error popup windows.

CMake 3.31 additions include:

CMake warns if cmake_minimum_required() is < 3.10.
TLS ≥ 1.2 is required by default for internet operations e.g. file(DOWNLOAD), ExternalProject, FetchContent, and similar.
file(ARCHIVE_CREATE) gained a long-needed WORKING_DIRECTORY parameter that is essentially necessary to avoid machine-specific paths being embedded in the archive.
CMAKE_LINK_LIBRARIES_STRATEGY allows specifying a strategy for ordering target direct link dependencies.

CMake 3.30 additions include:

C++26 support.
CMAKE_TLS_VERIFY environment variable was added to set TLS verification (true, false).
defaults CMAKE_TLS_VERIFY to on, where previously it was off.

CMake 3.29 additions include:

cmake_language(EXIT code) to exit CMake script mode with a specific return code. This is useful when using CMake as a platform-agnostic scripting language instead of shell script.
Environment variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is used to set the default install prefix across projects–it can be overridden as typical by cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX= option.
Target property TEST_LAUNCHER allows specifying a test launcher. For MPI program this allows deduplicating or making more programmatic test runner scripts.
Linker information variables including CMAKE__COMPILER_LINKER_ID have been added to allow programmatic logic like setting target_link_options() based on the particular linker.
ctest --parallel without a number or 0 will use unbounded test run parallelism.

CMake 3.28 additions include:

changes PATH behavior for Windows find_{library,path,file}() to no longer search PATH. This may break some projects that rely on PATH for finding libraries. MSYS2-distributed CMake is patched to include PATH like earlier CMake, which can be confusing for CI etc. not using MSYS CMake with that patch. Windows CI/user may need to specify CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH like
```
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$Env:SYSTEMDRIVE/msys64/ucrt64/lib -B build
```
Support for C++20 modules is considerably improved and most users will want at least CMake 3.28 to make C++ modules usable.
Generator expressions $<IF> $<AND> $<OR> now short circuit.
Test properties now have a DIRECTORY parameter, useful for setting test parameters from the project’s top level CMakeLists.txt.
CMake 3.28.4 fixed a long-standing bug in Ninja Fortran targets that use include statements.

CMake 3.27 additions include:

emits warning for cmake_minimum_required(VERSION) < 3.5.
CTest test properties TIMEOUT_SIGNAL_NAME and TIMEOUT_SIGNAL_GRACE_PERIOD specify a POSIX signal to send to a timed out test process.
Interactive CMake debugger added by cmake --debugger is used with an IDE such as Visual Studio.
CMake script command cmake_file_api() allows querying CMake File API from within CMake.

ℹ️ Note

Fortran + Ninja was broken for OBJECT libraries in CMake 3.27.0..3.27.8 and fixed in 3.27.9.