Can I write a Conan recipe to download and install a package from the web?

Question

We just started using conan, so I'm still new. One of our dependent libs doesn't have a conan recipe (it's just a cmake-based project on github). Can I write my own local recipe to download it from github and build it so I can add it to my dependencies like any other conan project?

Answer 1

First checkout the code. You can either do that by using the git tools or run command.

from conans import ConanFile, CMake, tools

class HelloConan(ConanFile):

    def source(self):
        self.run("git clone https://github.com/conan-io/hello.git")
    #or using git tools
        git = tools.Git(folder="hello")
        git.clone("https://github.com/conan-io/hello.git", "master")

Then build it as you normally would with either cmake tools or run command

from conans import ConanFile, CMake

class ExampleConan(ConanFile):
    def build(self):
        cmake = CMake(self)
        self.run('cmake "%s" %s' % (self.source_folder, cmake.command_line))
        self.run('cmake --build . %s' % cmake.build_config)
        self.run('cmake --build . --target install')
        cmake = CMake(self)

    #Using cmake tools
        build_folder=self.build_folder)
        cmake.configure()
        cmake.build()
        cmake.test() # Build the "RUN_TESTS" or "test" target
        cmake.install()

For my information look at the documentation for

Creating a new conanfile.py

Checkoing out the code

Building using cmake