PkgConfig

Warning

These tools are still experimental (so subject to breaking changes) but with very stable syntax. We encourage the usage of it to be prepared for Conan 2.0.

Available since: 1.43.0

This tool can execute pkg_config executable to extract information from existing .pc files. This can be useful for example to create a “system” package recipe over some system installed library, as a way to automatically extract the .pc information from the system. Or if some proprietary package has a build system that only outputs .pc files.

The constructor is:

def __init__(self, conanfile, library, pkg_config_path=None):

  • conanfile: The current self instance of the conanfile using the tool

  • library: The library which .pc file is to be parsed. It must exist in the pkg_config path

  • pkg_config_path: If defined it will be prepended to PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable, so the execution finds the required files.

It can be used as:

pkg_config = PkgConfig(conanfile, "libastral", pkg_config_path=<somedir>)

print(pkg_config.provides) # something like"libastral = 6.6.6"
print(pkg_config.version) # something like"6.6.6"
print(pkg_config.includedirs) # something like['/usr/local/include/libastral']
print(pkg_config.defines) # something like['_USE_LIBASTRAL']
print(pkg_config.libs) # something like['astral', 'm']
print(pkg_config.libdirs) # something like['/usr/local/lib/libastral']
print(pkg_config.linkflags) # something like['-Wl,--whole-archive']
print(pkg_config.variables['prefix']) # something like'/usr/local'

There is a convenience method fill_cpp_info(), that can be used in the package_info() method as:

def package_info(self):
    pkg_config = PkgConfig(conanfile, "libastral", pkg_config_path=tmp_dir)
    pkg_config.fill_cpp_info(self.cpp_info, is_system=False, system_libs=["m", "rt"])

Where:

  • cpp_info first argument could be the global one or a component one.

  • is_system: if True, all detected libraries will be assigned to cpp_info.system_libs, and none to cpp_info.libs.

  • system_libs: If is_system=False, this argument allows defining some potential system libraries found that would be assigned to cpp_info.system_libs. The remaining detected libs will be assigned to cpp_info.libs.

conf

This helper will listen to tools.gnu:pkg_config configuration to define the pkg_config executable name or full path. It will by default it is pkg-config.