Make

Conan provides integration with plain Makefiles by means of the make generator. If you are using Makefile to build your project you could get the information of the dependencies in a conanbuildinfo.mak file. All you have to do is indicate the generator like this:

conanfile.txt

 [generators]
 make

conanfile.py

 class MyConan(ConanFile):
     ...
     generators = "make"

Example

We are going to use the same example from Getting Started, a MD5 hash calculator app.

This is the main source file for it:

main.cpp

 #include "Poco/MD5Engine.h"
 #include "Poco/DigestStream.h"

 #include <iostream>


 int main(int argc, char** argv)
 {
     Poco::MD5Engine md5;
     Poco::DigestOutputStream ds(md5);
     ds << "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
     ds.close();
     std::cout << Poco::DigestEngine::digestToHex(md5.digest()) << std::endl;
     return 0;
 }

As this project relies on the Poco Libraries we are going to create a conanfile.txt with our requirement and also declare the Make generator:

conanfile.txt

 [requires]
 Poco/1.9.0@pocoproject/stable

 [generators]
 make

In order to use this generator within your project, use the following Makefile as a reference:

Makefile

 include conanbuildinfo.mak

 #----------------------------------------
 #     Make variables for a sample App
 #----------------------------------------

 CXX_SRCS = \
 main.cpp

 CXX_OBJ_FILES = \
 main.o

 EXE_FILENAME = \
 main


 #----------------------------------------
 #     Prepare flags from variables
 #----------------------------------------

 CFLAGS          += $(CONAN_CFLAGS)
 CXXFLAGS        += $(CONAN_CXXFLAGS)
 CPPFLAGS        += $(addprefix -I, $(CONAN_INCLUDE_DIRS))
 CPPFLAGS        += $(addprefix -D, $(CONAN_DEFINES))
 LDFLAGS         += $(addprefix -L, $(CONAN_LIB_DIRS))
 LDLIBS          += $(addprefix -l, $(CONAN_LIBS))


 #----------------------------------------
 #     Make Commands
 #----------------------------------------

 COMPILE_CXX_COMMAND         ?= \
     g++ -c $(CPPFLAGS) $(CXXFLAGS) $< -o $@

 CREATE_EXE_COMMAND          ?= \
     g++ $(CXX_OBJ_FILES) \
     $(CXXFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $(LDLIBS) \
     -o $(EXE_FILENAME)


 #----------------------------------------
 #     Make Rules
 #----------------------------------------

 .PHONY                  :   exe
 exe                     :   $(EXE_FILENAME)

 $(EXE_FILENAME)         :   $(CXX_OBJ_FILES)
     $(CREATE_EXE_COMMAND)

 %.o                     :   $(CXX_SRCS)
     $(COMPILE_CXX_COMMAND)

Now we are going to let Conan retrieve the dependencies and generate the dependency information in a conanbuildinfo.mak:

$ conan install .

Then let’s call make to generate our project:

$ make exe

Now you can run your application with ./main.