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Last active January 9, 2026 16:18
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Running & Building a C Makefile Project with CLion & WSL (January 2022)
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clion-makefile-setup.md

Running & Building a C Makefile Project with CLion & WSL (January 2022)

  • Set CLion Toolchain to WSL
    • Settings/Build, Execution & Deployment/Toolchains
    • Make sure all checks pass
    • If necessary, install C build tools on WSL side sudo apt-get install build-essential
  • From CLion, use File/Open... -> your MakeFile -> "Open as Project" -Note: if your MakeFile does not contain an "all" target, the CLion Makefile plugin thing might get angry and not parse any of the other targets
  • Go to "Edit Configurations" (on the upper-right)
    • Make sure your configuration is "Makefile Application", and NOT "Makefile Target" ("Makefile Target" produces errors)
    • in the Run/Debug Configuration for your Build Target, set the Executable field to point to the full path to your executable e.g. D:\Dev\my-project\my-library
      • this should correspond to the output of Makefile recipe for this build target
  • If everything is set up correctly, you should be able to build, run and debug
@yoawk
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yoawk commented Jan 9, 2026

Thanks a lot!
I will add that (at least on my CLion version), "Makefile Application" is not an option anymore.
CLion automatically setup "Native Application" configuration, and so far it works well.

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