We are pleased to announce that Conan 1.52 has been released and brings some significant new features and bug fixes. First, this release comes with some improvements in the MSBuild and CMakeToolchain tools. Also, we continue the work of easing the migration to Conan 2.0 with features like supporting installing remotes.json in 1.X or making the to_apple_arch tool public. We added a new export_conandata_patches tool and a new argument for cmake_layout to define the build folder.

Also, it’s worth noting that Conan 2.0-beta3 was released this month with several new features and fixes.

Improvements in build-systems tools

MSBuild

Support targets argument in MSBuild.build() method. With this argument, you can pass the specific target you want to build. You can use it in your recipes like:

...
class MylibConan(ConanFile):
    ...
    def build(self):
        msbuild = MSBuild(self)
        msbuild.build("MyProject.sln", targets=["mytarget"])

And the MSBuild build() method will internally add the /target=mytarget argument to the call.

CMakeToolchain

Added support for BUILD_TESTING CMake variable in CMakeToolchain. This variable is added to the CMakePresets.json file generated by the toolchain and it will set the variable to OFF, when the tools.build:skip_test configuration is true.

Continue working on easing migration to Conan 2.0

As a continuation of the effort to make migration to Conan 2.0 easier, we added some features to Conan 1.52 like:

  • Support for remotes.json in conan config install command. This file, that replaces the 1.X remotes.txt can be installed in the local cache with the conan config install command. Please, note that only one of remotes.json or remotes.txt should be installed.

  • Support for traits in 1.X self.requires(). One of the new features in Conan 2.0 is the support for traits to enhance the Conan dependency model. As there are recipes that will take advantage of the traits model we have enabled the possibility to set those traits arguments in Conan 1.X as well. Be aware that these arguments will not have any effect in Conan 1.X but will not make the recipe throw an error enabling the migration.

  • Add conan.tools.apple.to_apple_arch tool. This tool is useful to convert between Conan-style arch settings and the format understood by the Apple build tools (x86 to i386, armv8 to arm64, etc.).

  • Added ability to pass additional arguments to conan.tools.scm.Git.clone(). Using that argument you can add extra arguments as a list to the git clone call:

  from conan import ConanFile
  from conan.tools.scm import Git

  class App(ConanFile):
      version = "1.2.3"

      def source(self):
          git = Git(self)
          clone_args = ['--depth', '1', '--branch', self.version]
          git.clone(url="https://path/to/repo.git", args=clone_args)

Please, do not forget to check our migration to Conan 2.0 guide in the Conan documentation.

New export_conandata_patches tool

Very similar to the apply_conandata_patches() tool, we added a new export_conandata_patches tool to exports patches declared in the conandata.yml file. Use it like:

from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.files import export_conandata_patches

class MyLibrary(ConanFile):
  ...
  def export_sources(self):
      export_conandata_patches(self)

It will copy all the patches defined in the conanfile.conan_data from the conanfile.recipe_folder to the conanfile.exports_sources_folder.

New build folder argument for cmake_layout

When declaring the cmake_layout in recipes, it will set the value for conanfile.folders.build to build if the cmake generator is multi-configuration or build/Debug or build/Release if the cmake generator is single-configuration, depending on the build_type. Now, using the build_folder argument you can redefine the value of the build string:

from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.cmake import cmake_layout

class MyLibrary(ConanFile):
  ...
  def layout(self):
      cmake_layout(self, build_folder="mybuildfolder")

That will result setting the conanfile.folders.build to mybuildfolder for multi-configuration and mybuildfolder/Debug or mybuildfolder/Release for single-configuration.

Conan 2.0-beta3 released

Conan 2.0 beta3 is already out. You can install it using pip:

$ pip install conan --pre

Don’t forget to check the documentation for Conan 2.0.


Besides the items listed above, there were some minor bug fixes you may wish to read about. If so please refer to the changelog for the complete list.

We hope you enjoy this release and look forward to your feedback.