AutotoolsDeps

Important

Some of the features used in this section are still under development, while they are recommended and usable and we will try not to break them in future releases, some breaking changes might still happen if necessary to prepare for the Conan 2.0 release.

Available since: 1.35.0

The AutotoolsDeps is the dependencies generator for Autotools. It will generate shell scripts containing environment variable definitions that the autotools build system can understand.

Important

This class will require very soon to define both the “host” and “build” profiles. It is very recommended to start defining both profiles immediately to avoid future breaking. Furthermore, some features, like trying to cross-compile might not work at all if the “build” profile is not provided.

The AutotoolsDeps generator can be used by name in conanfiles:

conanfile.py

class Pkg(ConanFile):
    generators = "AutotoolsDeps"

conanfile.txt

[generators]
AutotoolsDeps

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

from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.gnu import AutotoolsDeps

class App(ConanFile):
    settings = "os", "arch", "compiler", "build_type"

    def generate(self):
        tc = AutotoolsDeps(self)
        tc.generate()

The AutotoolsDeps will generate after a conan install command the conanautotoolsdeps.sh or conanautotoolsdeps.bat files:

$ conan install conanfile.py # default is Release
$ source conanautotoolsdeps.sh
# or in Windows
$ conanautotoolsdeps.bat

This generator will define aggregated variables CPPFLAGS, LIBS, LDFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, CFLAGS that accumulate all dependencies information, including transitive dependencies, with flags like -I<path>, -L<path>, etc.

At this moment, only the requires information is generated, the tool_requires one is not managed by this generator yet.

Attributes

environment : Environment object containing the computed variables. If you need to modify some of the computed values you can access to the environment object.

from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.gnu import AutotoolsDeps

class App(ConanFile):
    settings = "os", "arch", "compiler", "build_type"

    def generate(self):
        tc = AutotoolsDeps(self)
        tc.environment.remove("CPPFLAGS", "undesired_value")
        tc.environment.append("CPPFLAGS", "var")
        tc.environment.define("OTHER", "cat")
        tc.environment.unset("LDFLAGS")
        tc.generate()