How to link with Apple Frameworks

It is common in macOS that your conan package needs to link with a complete Apple framework, and, of course, you want to propagate this information to all projects/libraries that uses your package.

With regular libraries we use self.cpp_info.libs object to append to it all the libraries:

def package_info(self):

    self.cpp_info.libs = ["SDL2"]
    self.cpp_info.libs.append("OpenGL32")

With frameworks we need to declare the “-framework flag” as a linker flag:

def package_info(self):

    self.cpp_info.libs = ["SDL2"]

    self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework Carbon")
    self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework CoreAudio")
    self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework Security")
    self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework IOKit")

    self.cpp_info.sharedlinkflags = self.cpp_info.exelinkflags

In the previous example we are using self.cpp_info.exelinkflags. If we are using CMake to consume this package, it will only link those frameworks if we are building an executable and sharedlinkflags will only apply if we are building a shared library.

If we are not using CMake to consume this package sharedlinkflags and exelinkflags are used indistinctly. In the example above we are assigning in the last line sharedlinkflags with exelinkflags, so no matter what the consumer will build, it will indicate to the linker to link with the specified frameworks.

How to package Apple Frameworks

To package an Apple framework:

• Copy/create a framework folder XXX.framework (XXX being the name of your framework), to your package folder, where you should put all the subdirectories (Headers, Modules, etc).

def package(self):
    # If you have the framework folder built in your build_folder:
    self.copy("XXX.framework/*", symlinks=True)
    # Or build the destination folder:
    tools.mkdir("XXX.framework/Headers")
    self.copy("*.h", dst="XXX.framework/Headers")
    # ...

• Declare the framework in the cpp_info object.

def package_info(self):
    ...
    self.cpp_info.includedirs = ['XXX.framework/Headers']
    self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework XXX")
    # Note that -F flags are not automatically adjusted in "cmake"
    # generator so it will be needed to declare its path like this:
    # self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-F path/to/the/framework -framework XXX")
    self.cpp_info.sharedlinkflags = self.cpp_info.exelinkflags