VirtualEnv

Warning

This is a very experimental feature and it will have breaking changes in future releases.

The VirtualEnv generator can be used by name in conanfiles:

conanfile.py

class Pkg(ConanFile):
    generators = "VirtualEnv"

conanfile.txt

[generators]
VirtualEnv

And it can also be fully instantiated in the conanfile generate() method:

conanfile.py

from conans import ConanFile
from conan.tools.env import VirtualEnv

class Pkg(ConanFile):
    settings = "os", "compiler", "arch", "build_type"
    requires = "zlib/1.2.11", "bzip2/1.0.8"

    def generate(self):
        ms = VirtualEnv(self)
        ms.generate()

When the VirtualEnv generator is used, calling conan install will generate files containing environment variables information:

conanbuildenv .bat or .sh scripts, that are automatically loaded if existing by the self.run() recipes methods. conanbuildenv is the build time environment information. It is collected from the direct build_requires in “build” context recipes from the self.buildenv_info definition plus the self.runenv_info of the transitive dependencies of those build_requires.
conanrunenv .bat or .sh scripts, that can be explicitly opted-in in self.run() recipes methods with self.run(..., env=["conanrunenv"]). conanrunenv is the runtime environment information, anything that is necessary in the environment to actually run the compiled executables and applications.
In both cases, whenever the runtime environment information is necessary, it wil also be automatically deduced from the self.cpp_info definition of the package, to define PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH and DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH environment variables.