The CONTROL file contains metadata about the port. The syntax is based on the Debian control format although we only support the subset of fields documented here.
Field names are case-sensitive and start the line without leading whitespace. Paragraphs are separated by one or more empty lines.
The first paragraph in a CONTROL file is the Source paragraph. It must have a Source, Version, and Description field. It can optionally have a Build-Depends and Default-Features field.
Source: ace
Version: 6.5.5-1
Description: The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment
Source: vtk
Version: 8.2.0-2
Description: Software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization
Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, tiff, libxml2, jsoncpp, glew, freetype, expat, hdf5, libjpeg-turbo, proj4, lz4, libtheora, atlmfc (windows), eigen3, double-conversion, pugixml, libharu, sqlite3, netcdf-c
The name of the port.
When adding new ports be aware that the name may conflict with other projects that are not a part of vcpkg. For example json conflicts with too many other projects so you should add a scope to the name such as taocpp-json to make it unique. Verify there are no conflicts on a search engine as well as on other package collections.
Package collections to check for conflicts:
The port version.
This field is an alphanumeric string that may also contain ., _, or -. No attempt at ordering versions is made; all versions are treated as bit strings and are only evaluated for equality.
By convention, if a portfile is modified without incrementing the "upstream" version, a -# is appended to create a unique version string.
Some projects do not have named releases. In these cases use the date of the version do not have labeled releases, in these cases use the date of the last commit in YYYY-MM-DD format. See the abseil port as an example.
Example:
Version: 1.0.5-2
Version: 2019-3-21
A description of the library.
By convention the first line of the description is a summary of the library. An optional detailed description follows. The detailed description can be multiple lines, all starting with whitespace.
Example:
Description: C++ header-only JSON library
Description: Mosquitto is an open source message broker that implements the MQ Telemetry Transport protocol versions 3.1 and 3.1.1.
MQTT provides a lightweight method of carrying out messaging using a publish/subscribe model. This makes it suitable for "machine
to machine" messaging such as with low power sensors or mobile devices such as phones, embedded computers or microcontrollers like the Arduino.
The URL of the homepage for the library where a user is able to find additional documentation or the original source code.
Example:
Homepage: https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg
Comma separated list of vcpkg ports the library has a dependency on.
Vcpkg does not distinguish between build-only dependencies and runtime dependencies. The complete list of dependencies needed to successfully use the library should be specified.
For example: websocketpp is a header only library, and thus does not require any dependencies at install time. However, downstream users need boost and openssl to make use of the library. Therefore, websocketpp lists boost and openssl as dependencies
Example:
Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, tiff
If the port is dependent on optional features of another library those can be specified using the portname[featurelist] syntax.
Dependencies can be filtered based on the target triplet to support different requirements on Windows Desktop versus the Universal Windows Platform. Currently, the string inside parentheses is substring-compared against the triplet name. There must be a space between the name of the port and the filter. This will change in a future version to not depend on the triplet name.
Example:
Build-Depends: curl[openssl] (!windows&!osx), curl[winssl] (windows), curl[darwinssl] (osx)
Comma separated list of optional port features to install by default.
This field is optional.
Default-Features: dynamodb, s3, kinesis
Multiple optional features can be specified in the CONTROL files. It must have a Feature and Description field. It can optionally have a Build-Depends field. It must be separated from other paragraphs by one or more empty lines.
Source: vtk
Version: 8.2.0-2
Description: Software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization
Build-Depends: zlib, libpng, tiff, libxml2, jsoncpp, glew, freetype, expat, hdf5, libjpeg-turbo, proj4, lz4, libtheora, atlmfc (windows), eigen3, double-conversion, pugixml, libharu, sqlite3, netcdf-c
Feature: openvr
Description: OpenVR functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: sdl2, openvr
Feature: qt
Description: Qt functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: qt5
Feature: mpi
Description: MPI functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: msmpi, hdf5[parallel]
Feature: python
Description: Python functionality for VTK
Build-Depends: python3
The name of the feature.
A description of the feature using the same syntax as the port Description field.
The list of dependencies required to build and use this feature.
On installation the dependencies from all selected features are combined to produce the full dependency list for the build. This field follows the same syntax as Build-Depends in the Source Paragraph.