meta_package_manager.managers.vcpkg module

class meta_package_manager.managers.vcpkg.VCPKG

Bases: PackageManager

C and C++ library manager, covering what it installs machine-wide.

vcpkg has two modes and only one is a package manager in mpm’s sense. In manifest mode it reads a vcpkg.json from a project tree and installs beside it, which is project scope and out of scope here, recorded among the project-scoped ecosystems of Unsupported managers. In classic mode it installs into its own root, shared by everything on the machine, which Microsoft’s own documentation compares to brew or apt. That mode is what this wraps, on the same footing as the runtime managers mpm wraps for what they install globally.

Important

--classic is forced on every invocation, and it is the whole basis of that scoping. vcpkg otherwise searches upwards from the working directory for a vcpkg.json and silently switches modes on finding one, so a listing taken inside a C++ project would report that project’s dependencies instead of the machine’s. Unlike the equivalent levers on other managers, this one is a documented, stable switch rather than a workaround.

Caution

A package is identified by its full specification, name:triplet, because that is vcpkg’s own unit: the same library built for two triplets is two installations, removed independently. Search results are named without a triplet, since nothing is installed yet and a bare name resolves against the default triplet at install time.

Note

The inventory is read as JSON rather than from the human listing, which cannot be parsed safely: that listing pads the specification to a fixed fifty columns and truncates anything longer to exactly fifty characters, leaving no separator at all before the version. Real specifications exceed that width, so the rows whose identifier was already corrupted are also the rows a whitespace split would silently misread.

Warning

A vcpkg binary on PATH is not necessarily a working one. vcpkg is normally cloned and bootstrapped, and a packaged binary with no root configured errors on every operation asking for VCPKG_ROOT to be set. Homebrew ships exactly that, and says so in its own caveats. The failure is loud and self-explanatory rather than silent.

Documentation: vcpkg classic mode.

Initialize cli_errors list.

name: str = 'vcpkg'

Return package manager’s common name.

Default value is based on class name.

homepage_url: str | None = 'https://vcpkg.io'

Home page of the project, only used in documentation for reference.

platforms: frozenset[Platform] | Group | Platform | Iterable[Platform | Group] = frozenset({Platform(id='almalinux', name='AlmaLinux'), Platform(id='alpine', name='Alpine Linux'), Platform(id='altlinux', name='ALT Linux'), Platform(id='amzn', name='Amazon Linux'), Platform(id='android', name='Android'), Platform(id='arch', name='Arch Linux'), Platform(id='buildroot', name='Buildroot'), Platform(id='cachyos', name='CachyOS'), Platform(id='centos', name='CentOS'), Platform(id='chromeos', name='ChromeOS'), Platform(id='clearlinux', name='Clear Linux OS'), Platform(id='cloudlinux', name='CloudLinux OS'), Platform(id='debian', name='Debian'), Platform(id='endeavouros', name='EndeavourOS'), Platform(id='exherbo', name='Exherbo Linux'), Platform(id='fedora', name='Fedora'), Platform(id='generic_linux', name='Generic Linux'), Platform(id='gentoo', name='Gentoo Linux'), Platform(id='guix', name='Guix System'), Platform(id='ibm_powerkvm', name='IBM PowerKVM'), Platform(id='kali', name='Kali Linux'), Platform(id='kvmibm', name='KVM for IBM z Systems'), Platform(id='linuxmint', name='Linux Mint'), Platform(id='macos', name='macOS'), Platform(id='mageia', name='Mageia'), Platform(id='mandriva', name='Mandriva Linux'), Platform(id='manjaro', name='Manjaro Linux'), Platform(id='nixos', name='NixOS'), Platform(id='nobara', name='Nobara'), Platform(id='opensuse', name='openSUSE'), Platform(id='openwrt', name='OpenWrt'), Platform(id='oracle', name='Oracle Linux'), Platform(id='parallels', name='Parallels'), Platform(id='pidora', name='Pidora'), Platform(id='pikaos', name='PikaOS'), Platform(id='raspbian', name='Raspbian'), Platform(id='rhel', name='RedHat Enterprise Linux'), Platform(id='rocky', name='Rocky Linux'), Platform(id='scientific', name='Scientific Linux'), Platform(id='slackware', name='Slackware'), Platform(id='sles', name='SUSE Linux Enterprise Server'), Platform(id='slitaz', name='SliTaz GNU/Linux'), Platform(id='sourcemage', name='Source Mage GNU/Linux'), Platform(id='tuxedo', name='Tuxedo OS'), Platform(id='ubuntu', name='Ubuntu'), Platform(id='ultramarine', name='Ultramarine'), Platform(id='void', name='Void Linux'), Platform(id='windows', name='Windows'), Platform(id='wsl1', name='Windows Subsystem for Linux v1'), Platform(id='wsl2', name='Windows Subsystem for Linux v2'), Platform(id='xenserver', name='XenServer')})

List of platforms supported by the manager.

Allows for a mishmash of platforms and groups of platforms. Will be normalized into a frozenset of Platform instances at instantiation.

requirement: str | None = None

No floor, because vcpkg’s version is a release date rather than a semantic version and a requirement here is written in digits and comparisons alone, which a hyphenated date cannot be.

Nothing is lost by it. Every interface used here shipped alongside manifest mode in 2020, so no release a user could plausibly be running lacks them, and a floor could not catch the case that would matter anyway: a locally built vcpkg reports a sentinel date far in the future precisely so that version checks in scripts always pass.

pre_args: tuple[str, ...] = ('--classic',)

Pins every call to the machine-wide installation, whatever the working directory contains.

version_regexes: tuple[str, ...] = ('version (?P<version>\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2})',)

Search the release date the version banner reports.

$ vcpkg --classic version
vcpkg package management program version 2026-07-27-unknownhash

See LICENSE.txt for license information.

The trailing component is a commit hash, or a packager’s own marker, and is dropped.

property installed: Iterator[Package]

Fetch installed packages.

$ vcpkg --classic list --x-json

{
  "zlib:x64-linux": {
    "package_name": "zlib",
    "triplet": "x64-linux",
    "version": "1.3.1",
    "port_version": 0,
    "features": [],
    "desc": ["A compression library"]
  }
}

The port revision is appended to the version as vcpkg itself renders it, and only when it is not zero.

property outdated: Iterator[Package]

Fetch outdated packages.

vcpkg’s update is a report rather than a mutation: in classic mode it compares what is installed against the ports catalog and prints the difference, changing nothing. It refuses to run in manifest mode at all, which the forced --classic keeps it out of.

$ vcpkg --classic update

Using local port versions. To update the local ports, use ``git pull``.
The following packages differ from their port versions:
        corrade:x64-windows              2020.06#4 -> 2020.06#5
        openal-soft:x64-windows          1.22.2#5 -> 1.23.0

cli_names: tuple[str, ...] = ('vcpkg',)

List of CLI names the package manager is known as.

This list of recognized CLI names is ordered by priority. That way we can influence the search of the right binary.

..hint::

This was helpful in the case of the Python transition from 2.x to 3.x, where multiple versions of the same executable were named python or python3.

By default, this property’s value is derived from the manager’s ID (see the MetaPackageManager.__init__ method above).

id: str = 'vcpkg'

Package manager’s ID.

Derived by defaults from the lower-cased class name in which underscores _ are replaced by dashes -.

This ID must be unique among all package manager definitions and lower-case, as they’re used as feature flags for the mpm CLI.

search(query, extended, exact)

Fetch matching packages.

Read as JSON, whose keys are the port names. The human listing computes its column widths from the results and renders a port’s features as rows of their own carrying no version, neither of which a single pattern reads reliably.

Caution

Search does not support extended or exact matching.

Caution

--x-json is experimental, as its x prefix announces, and a vcpkg predating it ignores it silently rather than refusing it: the command succeeds and prints the human column listing instead. Decoding that as JSON raises, and since nothing isolates one manager’s failure from the rest of a fan-out, the exception took down an entire mpm search on any host carrying such a build. A version floor could not have caught it, vcpkg numbering its releases by date, as requirement explains, so the column listing is parsed instead when the JSON does not decode.

Falling back rather than merely reporting the loss matters beyond search: install picks its manager by searching first, so a vcpkg whose search answers nothing can install nothing either.

$ vcpkg --classic search excel --x-json
cpr                      1.14.2           C++ Requests is a simple wrapper around libcurl
cpr[ssl]                                  Enable SSL support
duckdb[excel]                             Statically link the excel extension into DuckDB
freexl                   2.0.0#2          FreeXL is an open source library to extract valid data

Return type:

Iterator[Package]

virtual: bool = False

Should we expose the package manager to the user?

Virtual package manager are just skeleton classes used to factorize code among managers of the same family.

install(package_id, version=None)

Install one package.

A bare name resolves against the default triplet; a full specification pins the one it names.

$ vcpkg --classic install zlib:x64-linux

Return type:

str

upgrade_all_cli()

Generates the CLI to upgrade all packages.

--no-dry-run is required for vcpkg to act at all: without it the command prints its plan, warns, and exits non-zero.

$ vcpkg --classic upgrade --no-dry-run

Return type:

tuple[str, ...]

upgrade_one_cli(package_id, version=None)

Generates the CLI to upgrade the package provided as parameter.

$ vcpkg --classic upgrade --no-dry-run zlib:x64-linux

Return type:

tuple[str, ...]

remove(package_id)

Removes a package.

--recurse is deliberately not passed. vcpkg refuses to remove a package other installations depend on, listing them and exiting non-zero, and that refusal is the right outcome: the alternative would quietly remove packages the user never named.

$ vcpkg --classic remove zlib:x64-linux

Return type:

str