Compile and Run the Application

Now that we have a minimal application in place, let’s build and run it to verify that everything is working as expected.

We’ll create a cmake-build folder inside the project directory. This is a common practice to keep build files separate from your source code, and it also keeps the command-line examples simple and clean.

Create the build directory and initialize the CMake build system:

$ mkdir cmake-build
$ cmake . -B cmake-build
...
-- Build files have been written to: ~/robot-escape/cmake-build

Build the application:

$ cmake --build cmake-build
[  1%] Building CXX object TokenDecoder.cpp.o
[  3%] Building CXX object Core.cpp.o
...
[100%] Linking CXX executable robot-escape
[100%] Built target robot-escape

Run the application:

$ ./cmake-build/robot-escape/robot-escape
Usage: ./cmake-build/robot-escape/robot-escape <config-file>

You should see a usage message indicating that the application is running correctly and expects a configuration file.

Writing a Sample Configuration

To properly test our parser, we need to provide a configuration file. Let’s create one in the project’s root directory named configuration.elcl.

Create and open the configuration file:
```
$ nano configuration.elcl
```
Add the following content:
<project>/configuration.elcl
```
[field]
width: 30
height: 16
```

This defines a simple configuration with a section named field, containing two integer values: width and height.

Run the Application with the Configuration

Now let’s run our application again, this time passing the configuration file as an argument:

$ ./cmake-build/robot-escape/robot-escape configuration.elcl
Field width = 30, height = 16

Success! 🎉 The application correctly parsed the configuration file and printed the values to the console.

Provoking some Errors →