Before you can use CMake to manage and build your C projects, you need to install it on your system. CMake is available for all major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. On Windows, you can download an installer from the official CMake website, which will guide you through the installation process. On macOS, the simplest way is to use a package manager like Homebrew by running brew install cmake in the terminal, or you can download a pre-built binary from the CMake website. For Linux, most distributions provide CMake in their package repositories; for example, on Ubuntu or Debian you can install it with sudo apt-get install cmake, and on Fedora you can use sudo dnf install cmake. Always check that you are installing a version that meets your project's requirements, as some package repositories may not have the latest release.

After installing CMake, you should verify that it is correctly set up and available from your command line. Open your terminal (or Command Prompt on Windows) and enter cmake --version. This command will print the installed CMake version and confirm that the program is accessible in your system's PATH. Once verified, you can start using basic CMake commands. The most common command to begin with is cmake . which configures the build in the current directory, assuming a CMakeLists.txt file is present. You can also specify a build directory, such as cmake -S . -B build, which tells CMake to use the current directory as the source and a subdirectory called build for generated files. These commands are the starting point for working with CMake on any platform.