How to create and share a custom generator with generator packages

There are several built-in generators, like cmake, visual_studio, xcode… But what if your build system is not included? Or maybe the existing built-in generators doesn’t satisfy your needs. There are several options:

  • Use the txt generator, that generates a plain text file easy to parse, which you might be able to use.

  • Use conanfile.py data, and for example in the build() method, access that information directly and generate a file or call directly your system

  • Fork the conan codebase and write a built-in generator. Please make a pull request if possible to contribute it to the community.

  • Write a custom generator in a conanfile.py and manage it as a package. You can upload it to your own server and share with your team, or share with the world uploading it to bintray. You can manage it as a package, you can version it, overwrite it, delete it, create channels (testing/stable…), and the most important: bring it to your projects as a regular dependency.

This how to will show you how to do the latest one. We will build a generator for premake (https://premake.github.io/) build system:

Creating a custom generator

Basically a generator is a class that extends Generator and implements two properties: filename, which will be the name of the file that will be generated, and content with the contents of that file. The name of the generator itself will be taken from the class name:

class MyGeneratorName(Generator):
    @property
    def filename(self):
        return "mygenerator.file"

    @property
    def content(self):
        return "whatever contents the generator produces"

This class is just included in a conanfile.py that must contain also a ConanFile class that implements the package itself, with the name of the package, the version, etc. This class typically has no source(), build(), package(), and even the package_info() method is overridden as it doesn’t have to define any include paths or library paths.

If you want to create a generator that creates more than one file, you can leave the filename() empty, and return a dictionary of filenames->contents in the content() method:

class MultiGenerator(Generator):

    @property
    def content(self):
        return {"filename1.txt": "contents of file1",
                "filename2.txt": "contents of file2"}  # any number of files

    @property
    def filename(self):
        pass

Once, it is defined in the conanfile.py you can treat is as a regular package, typically you will export it first to your local cache, test it, and once it is working fine, you would upload it to a server.

Premake generator example

Create a project (the best is a git repository):

$ mkdir conan-premake && cd conan-premake

Then, write in it the following conanfile.py:

from conans.model import Generator
from conans import ConanFile

class PremakeDeps(object):
    def __init__(self, deps_cpp_info):
        self.include_paths = ",\n".join('"%s"' % p.replace("\\", "/")
                                        for p in deps_cpp_info.include_paths)
        self.lib_paths = ",\n".join('"%s"' % p.replace("\\", "/")
                                    for p in deps_cpp_info.lib_paths)
        self.bin_paths = ",\n".join('"%s"' % p.replace("\\", "/")
                                    for p in deps_cpp_info.bin_paths)
        self.libs = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.libs)
        self.defines = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.defines)
        self.cppflags = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.cppflags)
        self.cflags = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.cflags)
        self.sharedlinkflags = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.sharedlinkflags)
        self.exelinkflags = ", ".join('"%s"' % p for p in deps_cpp_info.exelinkflags)

        self.rootpath = "%s" % deps_cpp_info.rootpath.replace("\\", "/")

class Premake(Generator):
    @property
    def filename(self):
        return "conanpremake.lua"

    @property
    def content(self):
        deps = PremakeDeps(self.deps_build_info)

        template = ('conan_includedirs{dep} = {{{deps.include_paths}}}\n'
                    'conan_libdirs{dep} = {{{deps.lib_paths}}}\n'
                    'conan_bindirs{dep} = {{{deps.bin_paths}}}\n'
                    'conan_libs{dep} = {{{deps.libs}}}\n'
                    'conan_cppdefines{dep} = {{{deps.defines}}}\n'
                    'conan_cppflags{dep} = {{{deps.cppflags}}}\n'
                    'conan_cflags{dep} = {{{deps.cflags}}}\n'
                    'conan_sharedlinkflags{dep} = {{{deps.sharedlinkflags}}}\n'
                    'conan_exelinkflags{dep} = {{{deps.exelinkflags}}}\n')

        sections = ["#!lua"]
        all_flags = template.format(dep="", deps=deps)
        sections.append(all_flags)
        template_deps = template + 'conan_rootpath{dep} = "{deps.rootpath}"\n'

        for dep_name, dep_cpp_info in self.deps_build_info.dependencies:
            deps = PremakeDeps(dep_cpp_info)
            dep_name = dep_name.replace("-", "_")
            dep_flags = template_deps.format(dep="_" + dep_name, deps=deps)
            sections.append(dep_flags)

        return "\n".join(sections)


class MyCustomGeneratorPackage(ConanFile):
    name = "PremakeGen"
    version = "0.1"
    url = "https://github.com/memsharded/conan-premake"
    license = "MIT"

    def build(self):
        pass

    def package_info(self):
        self.cpp_info.includedirs = []
        self.cpp_info.libdirs = []
        self.cpp_info.bindirs = []

This is a full working example. Note the PremakeDeps class as a helper. The generator is creating premake information for each individual library separately, then also an aggregated information for all dependencies. This PremakeDeps wraps a single item of such information.

Note the name of the package will be PremakeGen/0.1@user/channel as that is the name given to it, while the generator name is Premake. You can give the package any name you want, even matching the generator name if desired.

You export the package recipe to the local cache, so it can be used by other projects as usual:

$ conan export memsharded/testing

Using the generator

Let’s create a test project that uses this generator, and also an existing library conan package, we will use the simple “Hello World” package we already created before:

$ cd ..
$ mkdir premake-project && cd premake-project

Now put the following files inside. Note the PremakeGen@0.1@memsharded/testing package reference in conanfile.txt.

conanfile.txt

[requires]
Hello/0.1@memsharded/testing
PremakeGen@0.1@memsharded/testing

[generators]
Premake

main.cpp

#include "hello.h"

int main (void){
    hello();
}

premake4.lua

#!lua

require 'conanpremake'

-- A solution contains projects, and defines the available configurations
solution "MyApplication"
   configurations { "Debug", "Release" }
   includedirs { conan_includedirs }
   libdirs { conan_libdirs }
   links { conan_libs }
   -- A project defines one build target
   project "MyApplication"
      kind "ConsoleApp"
      language "C++"
      files { "**.h", "**.cpp" }

      configuration "Debug"
         defines { "DEBUG" }
         flags { "Symbols" }

      configuration "Release"
         defines { "NDEBUG" }
         flags { "Optimize" }

Let’s install the requirements and build the project:

$ conan install  -s compiler=gcc -s compiler.version=4.9 -s compiler.libcxx=libstdc++ --build
$ premake4 gmake
$ make (or mingw32-make if in windows-mingw)
$ ./MyApplication
Hello World!

Now, everything works, so you might want to share your generator:

$ conan upload PremakeGen/0.1@memsharded/testing

Note

This is a regular conan package. You could for example embed this example in a test_package folder, create a conanfile.py that invokes premake4 in the build() method, and use conan test to automatically test your custom generator with a real project.