Conjure

A modern build tool and dependency manager for C and C++.

Conjure compiles and links C/C++ projects from a single conjure.kdl manifest, manages their dependencies (local or remote git), and produces artifacts in a predictable layout. It drives your existing compiler and build tools rather than replacing them.

Features

• One manifest (conjure.kdl) describing sources, compiler/linker settings, dependencies, profiles, and multiple co-built projects.
• Parallel compilation (Rayon) and parallel dependency fetching.
• Profiles that can override far more than flags: type, link, cc, linker, standard, arch, sources, includes, and dependencies.
• Dependencies from local paths or git remotes (Codeberg, GitHub, Bitbucket, or any URL), pinned in a lockfile and cached per project scope.
• Build-system interop: Make, CMake, Autotools, Meson, Ninja, Xmake, Just, a free-form command, or Conjure itself (build: conjure).
• Toolchain support for GCC/Clang and every GCC-cli-compatible compiler (including cross compilers, zig cc, tcc, MinGW-w64), plus MSVC (cl / clang-cl).
• Content-hashed source fingerprinting so unchanged builds are skipped.
• compile_commands.json generation for clangd.
• Target architecture selection (x86_64, x64, arm64).

Installation

From source, with a recent Rust toolchain (edition 2024, Rust 1.95+):

cargo build --release
# binary at target/release/conjure

A Nix dev shell is provided for the build dependencies:

nix develop -c cargo build --release

Released binaries are published on the releases page for Linux (x86_64), macOS (x86_64, arm64), and Windows (MSVC and MinGW-w64, x86_64).

Git access uses the bundled libgit2, so no system git binary is required.

Usage

conjure new myproject            # scaffold a new project
conjure init                     # add a manifest to the current directory
conjure add github owner/repo    # add a dependency
conjure lock                     # pin dependencies (offline re-pin)
conjure update [name]            # re-fetch and re-pin dependencies
conjure build                    # build
conjure build -p release         # build a profile
conjure as release -- build      # run a command under a profile
conjure compile-commands         # write compile_commands.json for clangd

A minimal conjure.kdl

project {
  name myproject
  language c
  type binary
  link dynamic
  compile {
    standard c11
    c_flags -Wall -Wextra
  }
  dependencies {
    dep {
      remote github "owner/repo"
      build cmake libdep
    }
  }
}

See example/ for a more complete example.

Runtime dependencies

• A C/C++ compiler: any GCC-cli-compatible compiler, or MSVC cl on Windows.
• pkg-config (optional): resolves pkg_config entries in a manifest.
• The build tool a dependency declares (Make, CMake, etc.), if any.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD-3 Clause License - see the LICENSE file for details.