The install target in CMakeLists.txt is an essential component to this recipe:

install(
  TARGETS
    hello-conda
  DESTINATION
    bin
  )

This target makes sure that the binary is installed in ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin. The prefix variable is defined by Conda in the build step of meta.yaml:

build:
  number: 0
  binary_relocation: true
  script:
    - cmake -H. -Bbuild_conda -G "${CMAKE_GENERATOR}" 
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${PREFIX} # [not win]
    - cmake -H. -Bbuild_conda -G "%CMAKE_GENERATOR%" 
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="%LIBRARY_PREFIX%" # [win]
    - cmake --build build_conda --target install

The build step configures the project, sets the install prefix to ${PREFIX} (intrinsic variable set by Conda), builds, and installs the project. The motivation to call the build directory build_conda is similar to the previous recipes: a specific build directory name makes it easier to experiment with local installs based on directories that might already contain a directory called build.

By installing the package into the Anaconda environment, we made the executable available to the system.