Download SFML compatible with your compiler and extract it to folder in the project or use your package manager to download the library.

Root project Makefile takes care of building the project. It accepts two flags that are passed to CMake.

• CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE - the build type. If not specified Debug is used.
• SFML_DIR - CMake configuration path. This should be used when SFML was installed manually to tell find_package where to search SFML for.

make
build/Sandbox

This shows CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE and SFML_DIR passed as parameters. This assumes SFML was downloaded and extracted in vendor folder.

make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release SFML_DIR=vendor/SFML-2.5.1/lib/cmake/SFML
build/Sandbox

CMake should take care of creating the solution files. As this example does not use Makefile, you need to pass the SFML_DIR parameter directly to CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DSFML_DIR="vendor\SFML-2.5.1\lib\cmake\SFML"  ..

# for 32 bit version:
# cmake -A Win32 -DSFML_DIR="vendor\SFML-2.5.1\lib\cmake\SFML"  ..

After that open generated solution file and hit build. Copy needed dlls to binary location. Note: You may need to set Sandbox as the startup project.

This works similiar to the previous example but uses different generator.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DSFML_DIR="vendor\SFML-2.5.1\lib\cmake\SFML"  ..
make
# run the app after copying dll files
Sandbox.exe