Create your first Conan package with Autotools in Windows (msys2)¶
Warning
This example is intended for the Windows OS, using the msys2
subsystem to run the autotools build system.
The support is limited, the AutotoolsDeps
generator still doesn’t work for Windows, so the test_package
in the default template will fail.
Note this example is building with the MSVC compiler, not with MinGW/gcc. Even if the build system is autotools, the example is targeting the MSVC compiler, and the resulting package will be binary compatible and can be used from other packages using MSVC with other build systems. It is not necessary to force MinGW/gcc to use some open source dependencies that use autotools, and ConanCenter builds all of them with MSVC.
In the Create your first Conan package with Autotools tutorial, the autotools integrations are presented. Please read first that section, to understand them, as this section will only introduce the Windows/msys2 specific issues.
We will use the same the conan new command to create a “Hello World” C++ library example project:
$ conan new autotools_lib -d name=mypkg -d version=0.1
Check the above tutorial to understand the created files.
Besides these files, we will create a profile file:
include(default)
[conf]
tools.microsoft.bash:subsystem=msys2
tools.microsoft.bash:path=C:\ws\msys64\usr\bin\bash
tools.build:compiler_executables={"c": "cl", "cpp": "cl"}
Note that you might need to adapt the path to the bash
system of msys2
.
In the package recipe conanfile.py we will have:
win_bash = True
This is very important, it tells Conan that when this package is to be built, it has to launch a bash
shell to
execute the build in it.
Note
It is not necessary, and in fact it is not recommended for most cases to be already running inside an msys2
terminal. Conan will automatically run the build subprocess for autotools in the defined bash shell.
If already running in a bash shell, it is necessary to activate the tools.microsoft.bash:activate=True
conf.
Let’s build the package from sources with the current default configuration, making sure to deactivate the test_package
,
because otherwise it will fail.
# Deactivating the test_package, as AutotoolsDeps doesn't work yet.
$ conan create . -pr=msys2_profile -tf=""
...
mypkg/0.1: package(): Packaged 1 '.h' file: mypkg.h
mypkg/0.1: package(): Packaged 1 '.la' file: libmypkg.la
mypkg/0.1: package(): Packaged 1 '.lib' file: mypkg.lib
mypkg/0.1: Created package revision fa661758835cf6f7f311c857447393cc
mypkg/0.1: Package '9bdee485ef71c14ac5f8a657202632bdb8b4482b' created
We can now validate that the recipe and the package binary are in the cache:
$ conan list "mypkg:*"
Found 1 pkg/version recipes matching mypkg in local cache
Local Cache
mypkg
mypkg/0.1
revisions
6e85b0c27c7fbc8eddc1994dbb543b52 (2024-04-30 18:29:44 UTC)
packages
9bdee485ef71c14ac5f8a657202632bdb8b4482b
info
settings
arch: x86_64
build_type: Release
compiler: msvc
compiler.cppstd: 14
compiler.runtime: dynamic
compiler.runtime_type: Release
compiler.version: 193
os: Windows
options
shared: False
Note how the binary is a compiler=msvc
one.
See also