Using profiles

So far we have used the default settings stored in ~/.conan/profiles/default and defined as command line arguments.

However, configurations can be large, settings can be very different, and we might want to switch easily between different configurations with different settings, options, etc. The best way to do it is using profiles.

A profile file contains a predefined set of settings, options, environment variables, and build_requires and has this structure:

[settings]
setting=value

[options]
MyLib:shared=True

[env]
env_var=value

[build_requires]
Tool1/0.1@user/channel
Tool2/0.1@user/channel, Tool3/0.1@user/channel
*: Tool4/0.1@user/channel

Options allow definition with wildcards, to apply same option value to many packages:

[options]
*:shared=True

They would contain the desired configuration, for example:

clang_3.5

 [settings]
 os=Macos
 arch=x86_64
 compiler=clang
 compiler.version=3.5
 compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11
 build_type=Release

 [env]
 CC=/usr/bin/clang
 CXX=/usr/bin/clang++

You can store them in the default profile folder or anywhere in you project and you can use it instead of command line arguments:

$ conan create demo/testing -pr=clang_3.5

If we continue with the example of Poco, we could have a handy profile to help us build our project with the desired configuration and avoid the usage of all the command line arguments when installing the dependency packages.

A profile to install dependencies as shared and in debug mode will look like this:

debug_shared

 include(default)

 [settings]
 build_type=Debug

 [options]
 Poco:shared=True
 Poco:enable_apacheconnector=False
 OpenSSL:shared=True

With this we could just install using the profile:

$ conan install . -pr=debug_shared

We could also create a new profile to use a different compiler version and store it in our project directory:

poco_clang_3.5

 include(clang_3.5)

 [options]
 Poco:shared=True
 Poco:enable_apacheconnector=False
 OpenSSL:shared=True

Installation will be as easy as:

$ conan install . -pr=./poco_clang_3.5