How do I add global properties to generated Visual Studio projects and solutions via premake5?

Question

I would like to add two conditional properties to my project configuration to target a non-default vcpkg triplet: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/blob/master/docs/users/integration.md#with-msbuild

My project files are generated by premake. How would I go about this?

Answer 1

you could try to override the global function from the visual studio generator some thing like this ... not tested ...

local vs2010 = premake.vstudio.vs2010


function vcPkgOverride(prj)
        -- go trough the configs and platforms and figure out which conditions to put   
        for _, cfg in pairs(prj.cfgs) do
           local condition = vs2010.condition(cfg)
           if cfg.platform == "Win32" then 
                vs2010.vc2010.element("VcpkgTriplet ", condition, "x86-windows-static")
          else if cfg.platform == "x64" then
                vs2010.vc2010.element("VcpkgTriplet ", condition, "x64-windows-static")
          end
        end
end

premake.override(vc2010.elements, "globals", function (oldfn, prj)
        local elements = oldfn(prj)

            elements = table.join(elements, {
                vcPkgOverride
            })
        end

        return elements
    end)

UPDATE

The code above doesn't seem to work for premake5.0.0-alpha14 so I tweaked it based on the docs and here you have a less general, but working version:

require('vstudio')

local vs = premake.vstudio.vc2010

local function premakeVersionComment(prj)
    premake.w('<!-- Generated by Premake ' .. _PREMAKE_VERSION .. ' -->')
end

local function vcpkg(prj)
    premake.w('<VcpkgTriplet>x64-windows-static</VcpkgTriplet>')
    premake.w('<VcpkgEnabled>true</VcpkgEnabled>')
end

premake.override(premake.vstudio.vc2010.elements, "project", function(base, prj)
    local calls = base(prj)
    table.insertafter(calls, vs.xmlDeclaration, premakeVersionComment)
    return calls
end)

premake.override(premake.vstudio.vc2010.elements, "globals", function(base, prj)
    local calls = base(prj)
    table.insertafter(calls, vs.globals, vcpkg)
    return calls
end)

Add this at the start of your main premake5.lua script, or find a way to include it from somewhere else (I don't know much about lua or premake I just needed to fix this and wanted to show it to the community)