Build scripts (build.sh, bld.bat)

The build.sh file is the build script for Linux and macOS and bld.bat is the build script for Windows. These scripts contain the logic that carries out your build steps. Traditionally it has also included install steps. With the traditional one-package-per-recipe way of doing things, anything that your build script copies into the $PREFIX or %PREFIX% folder will be included in your output package. For example, this build.sh:

mkdir -p $PREFIX/bin
cp $RECIPE_DIR/my_script_with_recipe.sh $PREFIX/bin/super-cool-script.sh

If you don't care about deploying your package with pip on PyPI, this can save you a lot of time in figuring out the proper way to include additional files with setup.py.

There are many environment variables defined for you to use in build.sh and bld.bat. Please see Environment variables for more information.

As of conda-build 2.1, you can also define multiple output packages. Each package has its own script or list of files to include. The rules for these outputs are documented at Outputs section. When any output is defined, this overrides the default behavior of bundling anything in $PREFIX. So to output multiple packages from a single recipe, remove any installation steps from build.sh or bld.bat and do them instead in your install script(s) for each output.

build.sh and bld.bat are optional. You can instead use the build/script key in your meta.yaml, with each value being either a string command or a list of string commands. Any commands you put there must be able to run on every platform for which you build. For example, you can't use the cp command because cmd.exe won't understand it in Windows.

build.sh is run with bash and bld.bat is run with cmd.exe.

There is some development towards the ability to use bash scripts in Windows, but this is not currently supported. You may write your script as a .sh file, and then call it in your bld.bat file, but there is no way to directly run build.sh on Windows. The conda recipe at AnacondaRecipes/conda-feedstock is an example of this method.