CMake error at CMakeLists.txt:30 (project): No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found

I'm trying make a Visual Studio solution with CMake to compile the latest version of aseprite and CMake keeps giving me the:

No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found.
No CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER could be found.

I've already downloaded GCC, and I'm using Visual Studio 2015.

I'm following this tutorial:

https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/master/INSTALL.md

Those error messages

CMake Error at ... (project):
    No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found.
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
See also ".../CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
See also ".../CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log".

or

CMake Error: your CXX compiler: "CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER-NOTFOUND" was not found.
Please set CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER to a valid compiler path or name.
...
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

just mean that CMake was unable to find your C/CXX compiler to compile a simple test program (one of the first things CMake tries while detecting your build environment).

The steps to find your problem are dependent on the build environment you want to generate. The following tutorials are a collection of answers here on Stack Overflow and some of my own experiences with CMake on Microsoft Windows 7/8/10 and Ubuntu 14.04.

Preconditions

• You have installed the compiler/IDE and it was able to once compile any other program (directly without CMake)

  • You e.g. may have the IDE, but may not have installed the compiler or supporting framework itself like described in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42701019/problems-generating-solution-for-vs-2017-with-cmake or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38171878/how-do-i-tell-cmake-to-use-clang-on-windows

• You have the latest CMake version

• You have access rights on the drive you want CMake to generate your build environment

• You have a clean build directory (because CMake does cache things from the last try) e.g. as sub-directory of your source tree

  Windows cmd.exe

    > rmdir /s /q VS2015
    > mkdir VS2015
    > cd VS2015
  

  Bash shell

    $ rm -rf MSYS
    $ mkdir MSYS
    $ cd MSYS
  

  and make sure your command shell points to your newly created binary output directory.

General things you can/should try

1. Is CMake able find and run with any/your default compiler? Run without giving a generator

    > cmake ..
    -- Building for: Visual Studio 14 2015
    ...
   

   Perfect if it correctly determined the generator to use - like here Visual Studio 14 2015

2. What was it that actually failed?

   In the previous build output directory look at CMakeFiles\CMakeError.log for any error message that make sense to you or try to open/compile the test project generated at CMakeFiles\[Version]\CompilerIdC|CompilerIdCXX directly from the command line (as found in the error log).

CMake can't find Visual Studio

1. Try to select the correct generator version:

    > cmake --help
    > cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" ..
   

2. If that doesn't help, try to set the Visual Studio environment variables first (the path could vary):

    > "c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
    > cmake ..
   

   or use the Developer Command Prompt for VS2015 short-cut in your Windows Start Menu under All Programs/Visual Studio 2015/Visual Studio Tools (thanks at @Antwane for the hint).

Background: CMake does support all Visual Studio releases and flavors (Express, Community, Professional, Premium, Test, Team, Enterprise, Ultimate, etc.). To determine the location of the compiler it uses a combination of searching the registry (e.g. at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[Version];InstallDir), system environment variables and - if none of the others did come up with something - plainly try to call the compiler.

CMake can't find GCC (MinGW/MSys)

1. You start the MSys bash shell with msys.bat and just try to directly call gcc

    $ gcc
    gcc.exe: fatal error: no input files
    compilation terminated.
   

   Here it did find gcc and is complaining that I didn't gave it any parameters to work with.

   So the following should work:

    $ cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..
    -- The CXX compiler identification is GNU 4.8.1
    ...
    $ make
   

   If GCC was not found call export PATH=... to add your compilers path (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7584602/how-to-set-path-environment-variable-in-cmake-script) and try again.

2. If it's still not working, try to set the CXX compiler path directly by exporting it (path may vary)

    $ export CC=/c/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe
    $ export CXX=/c/MinGW/bin/g++.exe
    $ cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..
    -- The CXX compiler identification is GNU 4.8.1
    ...
    $ mingw32-make
   

   For more details see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17275348/how-to-specify-new-gcc-path-for-cmake

   Note: When using the "MinGW Makefiles" generator you have to use the mingw32-make program distributed with MinGW

3. Still not working? That's weird. Please make sure that the compiler is there and it has executable rights (see also preconditions chapter above).

   Otherwise the last resort of CMake is to not try any compiler search itself and set CMake's internal variables directly by

    $ cmake -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/c/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/c/MinGW/bin/g++.exe ..
   

   For more details see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13851830/cmake-doesnt-honour-d-cmake-cxx-compiler-g and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16128199/cmake-error-setting-compiler

   Alternatively those variables can also be set via cmake-gui.exe on Windows. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29746950/cmake-cannot-find-compiler

Background: Much the same as with Visual Studio. CMake supports all sorts of GCC flavors. It searches the environment variables (CC, CXX, etc.) or simply tries to call the compiler. In addition it will detect any prefixes (when cross-compiling) and tries to add it to all binutils of the GNU compiler toolchain (ar, ranlib, strip, ld, nm, objdump, and objcopy).

For Ubuntu, please install the below things:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential

This happened to me after I installed Visual Studio 15 2017.

The C++ compiler for Visual Studio 14 2015 was not the problem. It seemed to be a problem with the Windows 10 SDK.

Adding the Windows 10 SDKs to Visual Studio 14 2015 solved the problem for me.

See attached screenshot.

This works for me in Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark):

apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential

I also experienced this error when working with CMake:

No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found.
No CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER could be found.

The 'warning' box in the MSDN library article Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2015 gave me the help that I needed.

Visual Studio 2015 doesn't come with C++ installed by default. So, creating a new C++ project will prompt you to download the necessary C++ components.

I had the same errors with CMake. In my case, I have used the wrong Visual Studio version in the initial CMake dialog where we have to select the Visual Studio compiler.

Then I changed it to "Visual Studio 11 2012" and things worked. (I have Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 version on my PC). In general, try to input an older version of Visual Studio version in the initial CMake configuration dialog.

I ran into this issue while building libgit2-0.23.4. For me the problem was that C++ compiler & related packages were not installed with VS2015, therefore "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" file was missing and Cmake wasn't able to find the compiler.

I tried manually creating a C++ project in the Visual Studio 2015 GUI (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe) and while creating the project, I got a prompt to download the C++ & related packages.

After downloading required packages, I could see vcvarsall.bat & Cmake was able to find the compiler & executed successfully with following log:

C:\Users\aksmahaj\Documents\MyLab\fritzing\libgit2\build64>cmake ..
-- Building for: Visual Studio 14 2015
-- The C compiler identification is MSVC 19.0.24210.0
-- Check for working C compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual        
Studio 14.0/VC/bin/cl.exe
-- Check for working C compiler: C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual  
Studio 14.0/VC/bin/cl.exe -- works
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info
-- Detecting C compiler ABI info - done
-- Could NOT find PkgConfig (missing:  PKG_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE)
-- Could NOT find ZLIB (missing:  ZLIB_LIBRARY ZLIB_INCLUDE_DIR)
-- zlib was not found; using bundled 3rd-party sources.
-- LIBSSH2 not found. Set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH if it is installed outside of 
the default search path.
-- Looking for futimens
-- Looking for futimens - not found
-- Looking for qsort_r
-- Looking for qsort_r - not found
-- Looking for qsort_s
-- Looking for qsort_s - found
-- Looking for clock_gettime in rt
-- Looking for clock_gettime in rt - not found
-- Found PythonInterp: C:/csvn/Python25/python.exe (found version "2.7.1")
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to:    
C:/Users/aksmahaj/Documents/MyLab/fritzing/libgit2/build64

For me, this problem went away on Windows when I moved my project to a shallower parent directory, i.e. to:

C:\Users\spenc\Desktop\MyProjectDirectory

instead of

C:\Users\spenc\Desktop\...\MyProjectDirectory.

I think the source of the problem was that MSBuild has a file path length restriction to 260 characters. This causes the basic compiler test CMake performs to build a project called CompilerIdCXX.vcxproj to fail with the error:

C1083: Cannot open source file: 'CMakeCXXCompilerId.cpp'

because the length of the file's path e.g.

C:\Users\spenc\Desktop\...\MyProjectDirectory\build\CMakeFiles\...\CMakeCXXCompilerId.cpp

exceeds the MAX_PATH restriction.

CMake then concludes there is no CXX compiler.

Make sure you have selected the correct version of Visual Studio. This is trickier than it seems because Visual Studio 2015 is actually Visual Studio 14, and similarly Visual Studio 2012 is Visual Studio 11. I had incorrectly selected Visual Studio 15 which is actually Visual Studio 2017, when I had 2015 installed.

After trying out all of the solutions with no luck, I just provided those missing parameter by cmake -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++ ...

None of the solutions here solves my problem - only when I install Windows Update for universal C runtime.

Now CMake is working and no more link hangs from Visual Studio.

Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows

You can also make sure you are the sudo user and you have READ/WRITE access on the directory you are working. I had a similar problem on OS X, and I got it fixed just by entering in sudo mode.

Just in case it helps any one like me in future:

I have had this issue for 24 hours now, on 3 different 64-bit machines(Win7 , Windows 8.1 VM and WIn 8.1 laptop) - whilst trying to build WebKit with VS 2017.

The simple issue here is that the VC++ compiler (i.e cl.exe and it's dependent DLLs) is not visible to CMake. Simple. By making the VC++ folders containing those binaries visible to CMake and your working command prompt(if you're running Cmake from a command prompt), voila! (In addition to key points raised by others , above)

Anyway, after all kinds of fixes - as posted on these many forums- I discovered that it was SIMPLY a matter of ensuring that the PATH variable's contents are not cluttered with multiple Visual Studio BIN paths etc; and instead, points to :

a) the location of your compiler (i.e. cl.exe for your preferred version of Visual Studio ), which in my case(targeting 64-bit platform, and developing on a 64-bit host) is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.15.26726\bin\Hostx64\x64

b) and in addition, the folder containing a dependent DLL called (which cl.exe is dependent on): api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll - which on my machine is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x64

These two directories being added to a simplified and CUSTOM System Path variable(working under a Admin priviledged commmand prompt), eliminated my "No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found" and "No CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER could be found." errors.

Hope it helps someone.

I get exactly the reported error if ccache is enabled, when using CMake's Xcode generator. Disabling ccache fixed the problem for me. Below I present a fix/check that works for MacOS, but should work similarly on other platforms.

Apparently, it is possible to use CMake's Xcode generator (and others) also in combination with ccache, as is described here. But I never tried it out myself.

# 1) To check if ccache is enabled:
echo $CC
echo $CXX
# This prints something like the following: 
#     ccache clang -Qunused-arguments -fcolor-diagnostics. 
# CC or CXX are typically set in the `.bashrc` or `.zshrc` file.

# 2) To disable ccache, use the following:
CC=clang
CXX=clang++

# 3) Then regenerate the cmake project
cmake -G Xcode <path/to/CMakeLists.txt>

I know this question is about visual studio 2015. I faced this issue with visual studio 2017. When searched on google I landed to this page. After looking at first 2,3 answers I realized this is the problem with vc++ installation. Installing the workload "Desktop development with c++" resolved the issue.

I updated Visual Studio 2015 update 2 to Visual Studio 2015 update 3, and it solved my problem.

I had the same issue with cmake-gui (No CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER could be found.), while running CMake from the command line worked fine. After manually adding the entries

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\bin

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin

to the PATH environment variable it worked for me.

For me it worked to use the Developer Command Prompt that comes with Visual Studio and then just cd to your/jcef/dir and run cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 Win64" ..

I had the same problem.

I was trying to install dlib on my machine and it gave me this error. The tutorial mentioned in the question leads to downloading visual studio 2017. I solved this by uninstalling VS 2017 and installing VS 2015

One can install VS 2015 via this stackoverflow thread : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44290672/how-to-download-visual-studio-community-edition-2015-not-2017

Look in the Cmakelists.txt if you find ARM you need to install C++ for ARM

It's these packages:

C++ Universal Windows Platform for ARM64 "Not Required"

Visual C++ Compilers and libraries for ARM "Not Required"

Visual C++ Compilers and libraries for ARM64 "Very Likely Required"

Required for finding Threads on ARM 
enable_language(C) 
enable_language(CXX)

Then the problems

No CMAKE_C_COMPILER could be found.

No CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER could be found.

Might disappear unless you specify c compiler like clang, and maybe installing clang will work in other favour.

You can with optional remove in cmakelists.txt both with # before enable_language if you are not compiling for ARM.

Make sure you have installed Windows SDK when you were installing Visual Studio. To add windows SDK you can go to Visual Studio Installer and hit "Modify" and then tick the checkbox of Windows SDK and install it.