How to Get Cmake to Find My Alternative Boost Installation

How can I get CMake to find my alternative Boost installation?

After digging around in CMake and experimenting, I determined that CMake was unhappy with the fact that all of my Boost libraries were contained in /usr/local/lib/boost and not /usr/local/lib. Once I soft-linked them back out, the build worked.

CMake does not find Boost on Custom Location on Windows

I have found a solution.
As mentioned in the last edit I made to my question, the first issue with the compiler could be fixed with the -DBoost_COMPILER=-vc142 option.
The second could be solved by using the -DBoost_USE_STATIC_LIBS=ON.

So the set block in the CMakeLists for boost is now:

set(BOOST_ROOT "boost_1_73_0")
set(Boost_COMPILER "-vc142")
set(Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS ON)

With these variables set, CMake runs without any problems.

Cmake doesn't find Boost

Are you sure you are doing it the correct way? The idea is that CMake sets BOOST_INCLUDE_DIR, BOOST_LIBRARYDIR and BOOST_ROOT automatically. Do something like this in CMakeLists.txt:

FIND_PACKAGE(Boost)
IF (Boost_FOUND)
    INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES(${Boost_INCLUDE_DIR})
    ADD_DEFINITIONS( "-DHAS_BOOST" )
ENDIF()

If boost is not installed in a default location and can, thus, not be found by CMake, you can tell CMake where to look for boost like this:

SET(CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH ${CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH} "C:/win32libs/boost")
SET(CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH ${CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH} "C:/win32libs/boost/lib")

Of course, those two lines have to be before the FIND_PACKAGE(Boost) in CMakeLists.txt.

How to change where CMakeLists.txt looks for Boost Libraries Ubuntu

According to the FindBoost documentation (http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.1/module/FindBoost.html), you can set a CMake variable BOOST_ROOT to give CMake a hint about where to look.

In your CMakeLists.txt file, you can add the following before the find_package(Boost...) line:

set(BOOST_ROOT /usr/local)

Update:
I agree with the comments that putting machine specific configuration parameters directly in CMakeLists.txt is not best practice.

As an alternative to directly setting this variable, you can pass options like this to the cmake process in CLion by doing the following:

Navigate to File -> Settings... -> Build, Execution, and Deployment -> CMake. Under Generation, add -DBOOST_ROOT=/usr/local to CMake options.

Cmake can find boost but not boost core

As I know there is no such a boost library core. You can check if a library should be linked here.
And Boost.Iterator is a header-only library, so you don't need to link anything. Just include <boost/iterator/...>. If you can't include, check whether these includes actually exist in your local boost distro.

I checked it for boost::counting_iterator<int> and all works well for me.

How to link C++ program with Boost using CMake

In CMake you could use find_package to find libraries you need. There usually is a FindBoost.cmake along with your CMake installation.

As far as I remember, it will be installed to /usr/share/cmake/Modules/ along with other find-scripts for common libraries. You could just check the documentation in that file for more information about how it works.

An example out of my head:

FIND_PACKAGE( Boost 1.40 COMPONENTS program_options REQUIRED )
INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES( ${Boost_INCLUDE_DIR} )

ADD_EXECUTABLE( anyExecutable myMain.cpp )

TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES( anyExecutable LINK_PUBLIC ${Boost_LIBRARIES} )

I hope this code helps.

Here's the official documentation about FindBoost.cmake.
And the actual FindBoost.cmake (hosted on GitHub)