Note: This example is valid for single-configuration generators and will not work for multi-configuration generators (e.g. Visual Studio).

By default, CMake's model is that a build directory only contains a single configuration, be it Debug, Release, MinSizeRel, or RelWithDebInfo. It is possible, however, to setup CPack to bundle multiple build directories and construct a package that contains multiple configurations of the same project.

First, we want to ensure that the debug and release builds use different names for the libraries that will be installed. Let's use d as the postfix for the debug libraries.

Set CMAKE_DEBUG_POSTFIX near the beginning of the top-level CMakeLists.txt file:

And the DEBUG_POSTFIX property on the tutorial executable:

Let's also add version numbering to the MathFunctions library. In MathFunctions/CMakeLists.txt, set the VERSION and SOVERSION properties:

From the Step12 directory, create debug and release subdirectories. The layout will look like:

Now we need to setup debug and release builds. We can use CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to set the configuration type:

Now that both the debug and release builds are complete, we can use a custom configuration file to package both builds into a single release. In the Step12 directory, create a file called MultiCPackConfig.cmake. In this file, first include the default configuration file that was created by the cmake executable.

Next, use the CPACK_INSTALL_CMAKE_PROJECTS variable to specify which projects to install. In this case, we want to install both debug and release.

From the Step12 directory, run cpack specifying our custom configuration file with the config option: