Is it possible to build 3rd party lib as a part of project build process?

Development Platform & Builds
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1

Hello,

Is it possible to build the 3rd party lib from sources as a part of project build (as opposite to using of pre-build binaries) ? After a lot of digging into the UE sources, Wiki, Answer hub and examples we were unable to get the clear and final answer on this question.

So far it seems that in 100% of cases the common approach is to build 3rd party library separately and then use it in UE project solely as a precooked binaries (providing necessary header files). For many reasons we are not happy with such approach and seeking for ability to build 3rd party lib from sources as a part of normal project build process.

Some notes:

  1. This is a C library. Does the Unreal Build Tool even aware of C sources (*.c) ?
  2. We want to preserve the library sources folders structure and don’t want to use UE’s Private/Public layout for library. There are “src” folder for sources, “include” folder for headers. So it could be simply get from VCS directly, with no further preparations. Is it possible to use custom [arbitrary] source folder layout ?

There are some questions like this was already asked, but no one was provided with clean and straightforward answer with full details. So it would be nice to hear real final answer from UE team.

Thanks in advance!

2

This is a year old now, but I am also looking for the same thing. The docs to build the library i’m using say to use ‘cmake’ and ‘make’ to build them, and that works great alone, but I need the Engine to build them, so they’re built in the same environment and settings (it’s causing some problems when compiling a project in Windows vs Linux). Has anybody had success with this?

3

Same here…I need to build a non unreal (real?) source library from within the unreal build system. I and others are actively developing both the library and the unreal project so we need to get rid of the two step build process of building the libs manually first.