Packaging `google-cloud-cpp`

This document is intended for:

Package maintainers that need to understand how to compile google-cloud-cpp from source to create their packaging scripts.
Developers who may not be able to use a package manager and want to compile the google-cloud-cpp libraries from source, including their dependencies.
Developers who might like to install the google-cloud-cpp libraries in /usr/local or a similar directory.

This document does not cover all cases for building google-cloud-cpp. The following are out of scope:

Developers who prefer using a package manager such as vcpkg, or Conda, should follow the instructions for their package manager.
Developers wanting to use the libraries as part of a larger CMake or Bazel project should consult the quickstart guides for the library or libraries they want to use.
Developers wanting to compile the library just to run examples or tests should consult the building and installing section of the top-level README file.
Contributors and developers to google-cloud-cpp should consult the guide to set up a development workstation.

Getting the source code

There are two primary ways of obtaining google-cloud-cpp's source code. You can use git:

git clone https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-cpp.git $HOME/google-cloud-cpp

Or obtain the tarball release (see https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-cpp/releases for the latest release):

VERSION="vX.Y.Z"
mkdir -p $HOME/google-cloud-cpp
wget -q https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-cpp/archive/${VERSION}.tar.gz
tar -xf ${VERSION}.tar.gz -C $HOME/google-cloud-cpp --strip=1

Installing `google-cloud-cpp` with pre-existing dependencies

If all the dependencies of google-cloud-cpp are installed and provide CMake support files, then compiling and installing the libraries requires two commands:

cmake -S . -B cmake-out -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Unfortunately getting your system to this state may require multiple steps, the following sections describe how to install google-cloud-cpp on several platforms.

Common Configuration Variables for CMake

As is often the case, the CMake build can be configured using a number of options and command-line flags. A full treatment of these options is outside the scope of this document, but here are a few highlights:

Consider using -GNinja to switch the generator from make (or msbuild on Windows) to ninja. In our experience ninja takes better advantage of multicore machines. Be aware that ninja is often not installed in development workstations, but it is available through most package managers.
If you use the default generator, consider appending -- -j ${NCPU} to the build command, where NCPU is an environment variable set to the number of processors on your system. You can obtain this information using the nproc command on Linux, or sysctl -n hw.physicalcpu on macOS.
By default, CMake compiles the google-cloud-cpp as static libraries. The standard -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON option can be used to switch this to shared libraries. Having said this, on Windows there are known issues with DLLs and generated protos.
With the default configuration, our CMake scripts will only compile a small subset of the libraries. As the number of libraries grows, we did not want to impose longer build times on existing customers.
- You can use the -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=... option to configure the set of libraries compiled and installed by CMake.
- For example, passing -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=storage will only compile the storage library. The target for this library is google-cloud-cpp::storage.
- The google/cloud/${library}/README.md files describe what services are supported by each library.
- You can provide more than one library. For example, -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=pubsub,iam,speech will compile the pubsub, iam, and speech libraries.
- The default is to compile bigtable, bigquery, iam, logging, pubsub, spanner, and storage.
- You can use -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__ to compile all the GA libraries.
- The storage library does not depend on gRPC or Protobuf. Customers only using this library can remove the build steps to compile these dependencies.

For more information about google-cloud-cpp configuration options, see the Compile time configuration guide.

Using `google-cloud-cpp` after it is installed

Once installed, follow any of the quickstart guides to use google-cloud-cpp in your CMake or Make-based project. If you are planning to use Bazel for your own project, there is no need to install google-cloud-cpp, we provide BUILD.bazel files for this purpose. The quickstart guides also cover this use-case.

Required Libraries

google-cloud-cpp directly depends on the following libraries:

Library	Minimum version	Description
Abseil	20200923, Patch 3	Abseil C++ common library ¹
gRPC	1.35.x	An RPC library and framework ²
libcurl	7.47.0	HTTP client library ³
crc32c	1.0.6	Hardware-accelerated CRC32C implementation ⁴
OpenSSL	1.0.2	Crypto functions for ³
nlohmann/json	3.4.0	JSON for Modern C++ ³
protobuf	3.15.8	Protobuf is needed for any library based on gRPC ⁵ ⁶

google-cloud-cpp also has an optional dependency on the following libraries:

Library	Minimum version	Description
OpenTelemetry	1.9.1	An observability framework⁷

Note that these libraries may also depend on other libraries. The following instructions include steps to install these indirect dependencies too.

Install Instructions per Platform

When possible, the instructions below prefer to use pre-packaged versions of these libraries and their dependencies. In some cases the packages do not exist, or the packaged versions are too old to support google-cloud-cpp. If this is the case, the instructions describe how you can manually download and install these dependencies.

Alpine (Stable)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, and OpenSSL:

apk update && \
    apk add bash ca-certificates cmake curl git \
        gcc g++ make tar unzip zip zlib-dev

Alpine's version of pkg-config (https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf) is slow when handling .pc files with lots of Requires: deps, which happens with Abseil, so we use the normal pkg-config binary, which seems to not suffer from this bottleneck. For more details see pkgconf/pkgconf#229 and #7052

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf && cd $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf
curl -fsSL https://distfiles.ariadne.space/pkgconf/pkgconf-2.2.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr && \
    make -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo make install && \
    cd /var/tmp && rm -fr build

The following steps will install libraries and tools in /usr/local. By default, pkgconf does not search in these directories. We need to explicitly set the search path.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig

Dependencies

The versions of Abseil, Protobuf, gRPC, OpenSSL, and nlohmann-json included with Alpine >= 3.19 meet google-cloud-cpp's requirements. We can simply install the development packages

apk update && \
    apk add abseil-cpp-dev crc32c-dev c-ares-dev curl-dev grpc-dev \
        protobuf-dev nlohmann-json openssl-dev re2-dev

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4}

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Fedora (40)

Install the minimal development tools:

sudo dnf makecache && \
sudo dnf install -y cmake curl findutils gcc-c++ git make ninja-build \
        patch unzip tar wget zip

Fedora:40 includes packages, with recent enough versions, for most of the direct dependencies of google-cloud-cpp.

sudo dnf makecache && \
sudo dnf install -y protobuf-compiler protobuf-devel grpc-cpp grpc-devel \
        json-devel libcurl-devel google-crc32c-devel openssl-devel

Patching pkg-config

If you are not planning to use pkg-config(1) you can skip these steps.

Fedora's version of pkg-config (https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf) is slow when handling .pc files with lots of Requires: deps, which happens with Abseil. If you plan to use pkg-config with any of the installed artifacts, you may want to use a recent version of the standard pkg-config binary. If not, sudo dnf install pkgconfig should work.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf && cd $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf
curl -fsSL https://distfiles.ariadne.space/pkgconf/pkgconf-2.2.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-system-libdir=/lib64:/usr/lib64 --with-system-includedir=/usr/include && \
    make -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo make install && \
sudo ldconfig && cd /var/tmp && rm -fr build

Older versions of Fedora hard-code RE2 to use C++11. It was fixed starting with Fedora:38. If you using Fedora >= 38 or you are not planning to use pkg-config(1) you can ignore this step. Alternatively, you can install RE2 and gRPC from source.

sed -i 's/-std=c\+\+11 //' /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/re2.pc

The following steps will install libraries and tools in /usr/local. By default, pkgconf does not search in these directories. We need to explicitly set the search path.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

openSUSE (Leap)

Install the minimal development tools.

NOTE: The default compiler on openSUSE (GCC 7.5.0) crashes while compiling some of the files generated by Protobuf. Minor variations in the Protobuf version or the libraries changes where the compiler crashes. We recommend you use GCC 8 or higher to compile google-cloud-cpp.

sudo zypper refresh && \
sudo zypper install --allow-downgrade -y automake cmake curl \
        gcc gcc-c++ gcc8 gcc8-c++ git gzip libtool make patch tar wget

Install some of the dependencies for google-cloud-cpp.

sudo zypper refresh && \
sudo zypper install --allow-downgrade -y abseil-cpp-devel c-ares-devel \
        libcurl-devel libopenssl-devel libcrc32c-devel nlohmann_json-devel \
        grpc-devel libprotobuf-devel

The following steps will install libraries and tools in /usr/local. openSUSE does not search for shared libraries in these directories by default. There are multiple ways to solve this problem, the following steps are one solution:

(echo "/usr/local/lib" ; echo "/usr/local/lib64") | \
sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/usrlocal.conf
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Use the following environment variables to configure the compiler used by CMake.

export CXX=g++-8

export CC=gcc-8

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Ubuntu (24.04 LTS - Noble Numbat)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, OpenSSL and libc-ares:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y apt-transport-https apt-utils \
        cmake ca-certificates curl git gcc g++ m4 make tar

Ubuntu:24 includes packages for most of the direct dependencies of google-cloud-cpp:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y  \
        libabsl-dev \
        libcurl4-openssl-dev \
        libgrpc++-dev protobuf-compiler-grpc \
        libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler \
        nlohmann-json3-dev

Patching pkg-config

If you are not planning to use pkg-config(1) you can skip these steps.

Ubuntu's version of pkg-config (https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf) is slow when handling .pc files with lots of Requires: deps, which happens with Abseil. If you plan to use pkg-config with any of the installed artifacts, you may want to use a recent version of the standard pkg-config binary. If not, sudo dnf install pkgconfig should work.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf && cd $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf
rm -f /usr/bin/pkgconf /usr/bin/pkg-config
curl -fsSL https://distfiles.ariadne.space/pkgconf/pkgconf-2.2.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr -with-pkg-config-dir=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig && \
    make -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo make install && \
sudo ldconfig && cd /var/tmp && rm -fr build
ln -s /usr/bin/pkgconf /usr/bin/pkg-config

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Ubuntu (22.04 LTS - Jammy Jellyfish)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, OpenSSL and libc-ares:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y apt-transport-https apt-utils \
        automake build-essential cmake ca-certificates curl git \
        gcc g++ libc-ares-dev libc-ares2 libcurl4-openssl-dev libre2-dev \
        libssl-dev m4 make pkg-config tar wget zlib1g-dev

Abseil

We need a recent version of Abseil. Enabling ABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD propagates the version of C++ used to compile Abseil to anything that depends on Abseil.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/archive/20250127.1.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DABSL_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD=ON \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Protobuf

We need to install a version of Protobuf that is recent enough to support the Google Cloud Platform proto files:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/protobuf && cd $HOME/Downloads/protobuf
curl -fsSL https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/archive/v29.4.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -Dprotobuf_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

gRPC

We also need a version of gRPC that is recent enough to support the Google Cloud Platform proto files. We install it using:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/grpc && cd $HOME/Downloads/grpc
curl -fsSL https://github.com/grpc/grpc/archive/v1.69.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DgRPC_INSTALL=ON \
        -DgRPC_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DgRPC_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_CARES_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_PROTOBUF_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_RE2_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_SSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_ZLIB_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

nlohmann_json library

The project depends on the nlohmann_json library. We use CMake to install it as this installs the necessary CMake configuration files. Note that this is a header-only library, and often installed manually. This leaves your environment without support for CMake pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/json && cd $HOME/Downloads/json
curl -fsSL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/archive/v3.11.3.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DJSON_BuildTests=OFF \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Ubuntu (20.04 LTS - Focal Fossa)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, OpenSSL and libc-ares:

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y apt-transport-https apt-utils \
        automake build-essential cmake ca-certificates curl git \
        gcc g++ libc-ares-dev libc-ares2 libcurl4-openssl-dev \
        libssl-dev m4 make pkg-config tar wget zlib1g-dev

Abseil

We need a recent version of Abseil. Enabling ABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD propagates the version of C++ used to compile Abseil to anything that depends on Abseil.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/archive/20250127.1.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DABSL_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD=ON \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Protobuf

We need to install a version of Protobuf that is recent enough to support the Google Cloud Platform proto files:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/protobuf && cd $HOME/Downloads/protobuf
curl -fsSL https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/archive/v29.4.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -Dprotobuf_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

RE2

The version of RE2 included with this distro hard-codes C++11 in its pkg-config file. You can skip this build and use the system's package if you are not planning to use pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/re2 && cd $HOME/Downloads/re2
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/re2/archive/2025-07-22.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON \
        -DRE2_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

gRPC

We also need a version of gRPC that is recent enough to support the Google Cloud Platform proto files. We install it using:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/grpc && cd $HOME/Downloads/grpc
curl -fsSL https://github.com/grpc/grpc/archive/v1.69.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DgRPC_INSTALL=ON \
        -DgRPC_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DgRPC_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_CARES_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_PROTOBUF_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_RE2_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_SSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_ZLIB_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

nlohmann_json library

The project depends on the nlohmann_json library. We use CMake to install it as this installs the necessary CMake configuration files. Note that this is a header-only library, and often installed manually. This leaves your environment without support for CMake pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/json && cd $HOME/Downloads/json
curl -fsSL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/archive/v3.11.3.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DJSON_BuildTests=OFF \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Debian (12 - Bookworm)

Install the minimal development tools.

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y apt-transport-https apt-utils \
        automake build-essential ca-certificates cmake curl git \
        gcc g++ m4 make ninja-build pkg-config tar wget zlib1g-dev

Install the development packages for direct google-cloud-cpp dependencies:

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y \
        libabsl-dev \
        libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler \
        libgrpc++-dev libgrpc-dev protobuf-compiler-grpc \
        libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev nlohmann-json3-dev

Patching pkg-config

If you are not planning to use pkg-config(1) you can skip these steps.

Debian's version of pkg-config (https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf) is slow when handling .pc files with lots of Requires: deps, which happens with Abseil. If you plan to use pkg-config with any of the installed artifacts, you may want to use a recent version of the standard pkg-config binary. If not, sudo dnf install pkgconfig should work.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf && cd $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf
curl -fsSL https://distfiles.ariadne.space/pkgconf/pkgconf-2.2.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-system-libdir=/lib:/usr/lib --with-system-includedir=/usr/include && \
    make -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo make install && \
sudo ldconfig && cd /var/tmp && rm -fr build
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Debian (11 - Bullseye)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, and OpenSSL:

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y apt-transport-https apt-utils \
        automake build-essential ca-certificates cmake curl git \
        gcc g++ libc-ares-dev libc-ares2 libcurl4-openssl-dev \
        libssl-dev m4 make ninja-build pkg-config tar wget zlib1g-dev

Abseil

Debian 11 ships with Abseil==20200923.3. Unfortunately, the current gRPC version needs Abseil >= 20210324. Enabling ABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD propagates the version of C++ used to compile Abseil to anything that depends on Abseil.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/archive/20250127.1.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DABSL_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD=ON \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

nlohmann_json library

Debian 11 also ships with nlohmann-json==3.9.1, which is recent enough for our needs:

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install -y nlohmann-json3-dev

Protobuf

Unless you are only using the Google Cloud Storage library the project needs Protobuf and gRPC. Unfortunately the version of Protobuf that ships with Debian 11 is not recent enough to support the protos published by Google Cloud. We need to build from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/protobuf && cd $HOME/Downloads/protobuf
curl -fsSL https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/archive/v29.4.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -Dprotobuf_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

RE2

The version of RE2 included with this distro hard-codes C++11 in its pkg-config file. You can skip this build and use the system's package if you are not planning to use pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/re2 && cd $HOME/Downloads/re2
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/re2/archive/2025-07-22.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON \
        -DRE2_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

gRPC

Finally, we build gRPC from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/grpc && cd $HOME/Downloads/grpc
curl -fsSL https://github.com/grpc/grpc/archive/v1.69.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DgRPC_INSTALL=ON \
        -DgRPC_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DgRPC_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_CARES_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_PROTOBUF_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_RE2_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_SSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_ZLIB_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Rocky Linux (9)

Install the minimal development tools, libcurl, OpenSSL, and the c-ares library (required by gRPC):

sudo dnf makecache && \
sudo dnf update -y && \
sudo dnf install -y epel-release && \
sudo dnf makecache && \
sudo dnf install -y cmake findutils gcc-c++ git make openssl-devel \
        patch zlib-devel libcurl-devel c-ares-devel tar wget which

Rocky Linux's version of pkg-config (https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf) is slow when handling .pc files with lots of Requires: deps, which happens with Abseil. If you plan to use pkg-config with any of the installed artifacts, you may want to use a recent version of the standard pkg-config binary. If not, sudo dnf install pkgconfig should work.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf && cd $HOME/Downloads/pkgconf
curl -fsSL https://distfiles.ariadne.space/pkgconf/pkgconf-2.2.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-system-libdir=/lib64:/usr/lib64 --with-system-includedir=/usr/include && \
    make -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo make install && \
sudo ldconfig && cd /var/tmp && rm -fr build

The following steps will install libraries and tools in /usr/local. By default, Rocky Linux 9 does not search for shared libraries in these directories, there are multiple ways to solve this problem, the following steps are one solution:

(echo "/usr/local/lib" ; echo "/usr/local/lib64") | \
sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/usrlocal.conf
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}

Abseil

Rocky Linux 9 includes a package for Abseil, unfortunately, this package is incomplete, as it lacks the CMake support files for it. We need to compile Abseiil from source. Enabling ABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD propagates the version of C++ used to compile Abseil to anything that depends on Abseil.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/abseil-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/archive/20250127.1.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DABSL_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD=ON \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Protobuf

Rocky Linux ships with Protobuf 3.14.x. Some of the libraries in google-cloud-cpp require Protobuf >= 3.15.8. For simplicity, we will just install Protobuf (and any downstream packages) from source.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/protobuf && cd $HOME/Downloads/protobuf
curl -fsSL https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/archive/v29.4.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -Dprotobuf_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

RE2

The version of RE2 included with this distro hard-codes C++11 in its pkg-config file. You can skip this build and use the system's package if you are not planning to use pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/re2 && cd $HOME/Downloads/re2
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/re2/archive/2025-07-22.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON \
        -DRE2_BUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

gRPC

We also need a version of gRPC that is recent enough to support the Google Cloud Platform proto files. Note that gRPC overrides the default C++ standard version to C++14, we need to configure it to use the platform's default. We manually install it using:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/grpc && cd $HOME/Downloads/grpc
curl -fsSL https://github.com/grpc/grpc/archive/v1.69.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DgRPC_INSTALL=ON \
        -DgRPC_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DgRPC_ABSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_CARES_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_PROTOBUF_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_RE2_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_SSL_PROVIDER=package \
        -DgRPC_ZLIB_PROVIDER=package \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

crc32c

The project depends on the Crc32c library, we need to compile this from source:

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/crc32c && cd $HOME/Downloads/crc32c
curl -fsSL https://github.com/google/crc32c/archive/1.1.2.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=OFF \
        -DCRC32C_USE_GLOG=OFF \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
    cmake --build cmake-out -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

nlohmann_json library

The project depends on the nlohmann_json library. We use CMake to install it as this installs the necessary CMake configuration files. Note that this is a header-only library, and often installed manually. This leaves your environment without support for CMake pkg-config.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/json && cd $HOME/Downloads/json
curl -fsSL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/archive/v3.11.3.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
      -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
      -DJSON_BuildTests=OFF \
      -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

opentelemetry-cpp

The project has an optional dependency on the OpenTelemetry library. We recommend installing this library because:

the dependency will become required in the google-cloud-cpp v3.x series.
it is needed to produce distributed traces of the library.

mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp && cd $HOME/Downloads/opentelemetry-cpp
curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp/archive/v1.20.0.tar.gz | \
    tar -xzf - --strip-components=1 && \
    cmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=yes \
        -DWITH_EXAMPLES=OFF \
        -DWITH_STL=CXX14 \
        -DWITH_ABSEIL=ON \
        -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_INSTALL=ON \
        -DOPENTELEMETRY_ABI_VERSION_NO=2 \
        -S . -B cmake-out && \
sudo cmake --build cmake-out --target install -- -j ${NCPU:-4} && \
sudo ldconfig

Compile and install the main project

We can now compile and install google-cloud-cpp:

# Pick a location to install the artifacts, e.g., `/usr/local` or `/opt`
PREFIX="${HOME}/google-cloud-cpp-installed"
cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="${PREFIX}" \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_WITH_MOCKS=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=OFF \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE=__ga_libraries__,opentelemetry
cmake --build cmake-out -- -j "$(nproc)"
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

macOS

First install Xcode to get all the needed development tools. These instructions also use Homebrew to install the needed third-party dependencies.

If you don't already have Xcode installed:

xcode-select --install

Follow the instructions at https://brew.sh to install Homebrew. Then install the needed dependencies:

# Some additional build tools
brew install cmake ninja
# Installs google-cloud-cpp's needed deps
brew install abseil protobuf grpc nlohmann-json crc32c openssl@1.1

⚠️ By default, Abseil's ABI changes depending on whether it is used with C++ >= 17 enabled or not. Installing Abseil with the default configuration is error-prone, unless you can guarantee that all the code using Abseil (gRPC, google-cloud-cpp, your own code, etc.) is compiled with the same C++ version. Homebrew's version of Abseil is compiled with C++17 and requires that all dependencies are thus compiled. See abseil/abseil-cpp#696, and the homebrew formula for more information.

Now configure, build, and install the google-cloud-cpp libraries that you need. In this example, we install the storage and spanner libraries. Please see the Compile time configuration guide for more details about how to configure the google-cloud-cpp builds.

cmake -S . -B cmake-out \
  -GNinja \
  -DGOOGLE_CLOUD_CPP_ENABLE="storage;spanner" \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release \
  -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF \
  -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR="$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)" \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/test-install
cmake --build cmake-out
cmake --build cmake-out --target install

Footnotes

Requires >= 20210324.2 for pkg-config files to work correctly. ↩
Some libraries, including the Google Cloud Storage client, can be compiled without gRPC support. ↩
Only some libraries (Compute, SQL Admin, and Google Cloud Storage) require this dependency. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Only the Google Cloud Storage client library requires this dependency. ↩
The Google Cloud Storage client does not require Protobuf. ↩
On some platforms, some libraries may need a newer version of Protobuf to workaround conflicts between system pre-processor macros and symbols used in the Protobuf-generated code. ↩
See the OpenTelemetry quickstart for detailed instructions on how to enable and build this optional dependency. ↩

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