Custom generator

Warning

This is a deprecated feature. Please refer to the Migration Guidelines to find the feature that replaced this one.

Don’t see a generator that suit your needs? You can create a custom generator package and use it in your recipes!

Basically a generator is a class that extends Generator and implements two properties:

filename (Required): Should return the name of the file that will be generated
content (Required): Should return the contents of the file with the desired format.

The name of the generator itself will be taken literally from the class name. In the example below, the name will be MyGeneratorName:

from conans.model import Generator


class MyGeneratorName(Generator):

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

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

If you want to create a generator that creates more than one file, you can leave the filename property empty and return a dictionary of filenames and contents in the content property, like this:

conanfile.py

 from conans import ConanFile
 from conans.model import Generator


 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

 class MyCustomGeneratorPackage(ConanFile):
     name = "multi_generator_package"
     version = "0.1"
     url = "https://github.com/..."
     license = "MIT"

This class should be 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. Then, it will work as a regular package.

Attributes

Ready only attributes available for use in the Generator class.

conanfile

To get the information from the requirements and the environment:

Variable	Description
self.conanfile.deps_cpp_info	deps_cpp_info
self.conanfile.deps_env_info	deps_env_info
self.conanfile.deps_user_info	deps_user_info
self.conanfile.env	Dictionary with the applied environment variables declared in the requirements

output_path

Path to the output folder where the files of the generator will be created.