I am very new to Conan and I am quite lost in the documentation at the moment and I cannot really find a way to do what I want.
Maybe I am not using the right tool for this, I am very open to suggestions.
Let's say my C++ project needs opencv and nlohmann_json to be built. I want to be able to create an archive of all my project's dependencies to be used as is, so it can be redistributed on our gitlab instance.
I want to have a repository which roughly looks like this:
├── conanfile.py
├── json
│ └── 3.10.4
│ └── conanfile.py
└── opencv
├── 4.4.0
│ └── conanfile.py
└── 5.1.0
└── conanfile.py
Where invoking the root conanfile.py would automatically build the required libs and copy their files as to have something like this:
├── conanfile.py
├── json
│ └── 3.10.4
│ └── conanfile.py
├── opencv
│ ├── 4.4.0
│ │ └── conanfile.py
│ └── 5.1.0
│ └── conanfile.py
└── win64_x86
├── include
│ ├── nlohmann
│ └── opencv2
└── lib
└── <multiple files>
and the CI/CD would archive the directory and make it available for download.
I have managed to build and package a very simple repo (https://github.com/jameskbride/cmake-hello-world) independently using the git tools and doing something like this:
def config_options(self):
if self.settings.os == "Windows":
del self.options.fPIC
def source(self):
git = tools.Git(folder="repo")
git.clone("https://github.com/jameskbride/cmake-hello-world", "master")
def build(self):
cmake = CMake(self)
cmake.configure(source_folder="repo")
cmake.build()
However, I cannot figure out how to get the files that I want to package from my main conanfile.py. All of the approaches I have tried so far needed the package to be built separately (ie, going to the folder, using conan source . conan build . and conan export-pkg .. I am, 100% sure I am not doing this properly but I can't really find a way to do this. I found something about deploy() in the docs but can't figure out how to use it...
NB: I would really, really prefer not using a remote with prebuilt binaries for dependencies. I want to build everything from source with the CMake configurations I have defined. I also explicitely don't want a conan package in the end. I just want an aggregation of all the files needed to be shipped directly to the machines.
This question has been answered by Conan's co-founder james here: https://github.com/conan-io/conan/issues/9874
Basically: