Use vcpkg on WSL 1 with Visual Studio - visual-studio

Question

I'm adventuring myself into compiling a CMake project using Visual Studio, targeting WSL 1.
Following Microsoft's tutorial to setup a CMake project in Visual Studio and debugging on WSL works fine. Things break when I try to install and use packages using Microsoft's vcpkg package manager after installing vcpkg into a separate Windows directory and integrating it into Visual Studio.
A simple example that fails:
# CMakeLists.txt
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
project(test)
find_package(protobuf CONFIG REQUIRED)
with the following error message:
CMake Error at C:\test\CMakeLists.txt:5 (find_package):
Could not find a package configuration file provided by
"protobuf" with any of the following names
protobufConfig.cmake
protobuf-config.cmake
Add the installation prefix of "unofficial-sqlite3" to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or
set "protobuf_DIR" to a directory containing one of the above
files. If "protobuf" provides a separate development package or
SDK, be sure it has been installed.
I'm getting Intellisense to recognize find_package and suggesting to install the package or copying the vcpkg command to clipboard.
The CMake toolchain file is pointing to the "C:/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake" file in the WSL-GCC-Debug configuration settings. Installing vcpkg on the Linux system and setting the CMake toolchain file to the corresponding path creates the exact same error output.
Running the "vcpkg install protobuf:x64-linux" command in the terminal creates the following output:
Computing installation plan...
The following packages will be built and installed:
protobuf[core]:x64-linux -> 3.14.0#1
Detecting compiler hash for triplet x64-linux...
Error: while detecting compiler information:
The log content at C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\stdout-x64-linux.log is:
-- Configuring x64-linux
CMake Error at scripts/cmake/vcpkg_execute_required_process.cmake:108 (message):
Command failed: ninja -v
Working Directory: C:/vcpkg/buildtrees/detect_compiler/x64-linux-rel/vcpkg-parallel-configure
Error code: 1
See logs for more information:
C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x64-linux-out.log
Call Stack (most recent call first):
scripts/cmake/vcpkg_configure_cmake.cmake:319 (vcpkg_execute_required_process)
scripts/detect_compiler/portfile.cmake:18 (vcpkg_configure_cmake)
scripts/ports.cmake:128 (include)
Error: vcpkg was unable to detect the active compiler's information. See above for the CMake failure output.
This is not a surprise as I don't expect it to be able to build packages targeting Linux on my Windows machine.
I'm new to cross-platform development and I find documentation on vcpkg + WSL rather sparse. Am I right in assuming that the packages should be installed by vcpkg running on the Linux system? Or do I need to have CMake setup on Windows to make vcpkg work on the Windows side?
Setup:
Windows 10 Build 19041
Visual Studio 2019 (16.8.5) with Visual C++ for Linux Development
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as WSL
vcpkg commit f226416d2

Answer 1

It seems that I was a bit off track.
vcpkg installed on the Windows machine is accessible on the Linux system the same way as the actual CMake project is accessible. Setting the "CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE" variable to the absolute "C:/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake" path gets translated into "/mnt/c/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake".
The missing step was to run the ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh script on the Linux system to make sure packages can be installed by vcpkg on the Linux system.
I also learned that packages have to be installed manually by running the vcpkg install command since there is no "build in" way to do this via CMake.