Conan Android Gradle Plugin

Why is this needed?

In order to use Conan dependencies in an Android project, conan install needs to be executed before CMake tries to find those libraries.

How it works

Conan Android Gradle Plugin creates 5 Gradle tasks:

• Four conan install tasks, to install conan dependencies for each architecture: conanInstall-armv7, conanInstall-armv8, conanInstall-x86, conanInstall-x86_64.

• One additional GenerateConanToolchainFileTask task, to generate build/conan/android_toolchain.cmake.

Tasks are added as dependencies to module level preBuild task and top level prepareKotlinBuildScriptModel task, if it is found.

preBuild task is executed before building Android project. prepareKotlinBuildScriptModel task is Android Studio sync task.

How to use

Conan Android Gradle Plugin is distributed through Gradle Plugin Portal ( pluginManagement { repositories { gradlePluginPortal() } } in settings.gradle).

To use this plugin, include it in the top level build.gradle:

plugins {
    id 'app.opendocument.conanandroidgradleplugin' version "0.9.2" apply false
}

And then apply the plugin in the module's build.gradle:

plugins {
    id 'app.opendocument.conanandroidgradleplugin'
}

Once the plugin is applied, it needs to be configured. Configuration currently consists of setting conan profile file for each architecture:

["armv7", "armv8", "x86", "x86_64"].each { arch ->
    tasks.named("conanInstall-" + arch) {
        profile.set("android-21-" + arch)
    }
}

Conan profile can be either a relative path or an absolute path, it could also be a regular conan profile, installed and managed by conan (e.g. default).

Plugin applies arch setting when calling conan install, thus all architectures can share the same profile, if no differentiation is needed - { profile.set("android") }.

Plugin also generates CMake toolchain file, which needs to be included by CMake:

android {
    defaultConfig {
        externalNativeBuild.cmake.arguments(
            "-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=build/conan/android_toolchain.cmake"
        )
    }
}

conanfile.txt

Task ConanInstall runs conan install ., dot means current directory, which should contain conanfile.txt or conanfile.py. To use a different directory or a different conanfile, e.g. backup-conanfile.txt, configure ConanInstall tasks with it:

["armv7", "armv8", "x86", "x86_64"].each { arch ->
    tasks.named("conanInstall-" + arch) {
        conanfile.set("subdir")
        // or
        conanfile.set("backup-conanfile.txt")
    }
}

Further reading

https://docs.conan.io/2/examples/cross_build/android/android_studio.html