Manifest Export on Internal Network

[mccartnm]

Hello vcpkg community!

After building an vcpkg export of various libraries required and bringing them into a network without internet access I've run into some roadblocks trying to use these materials.

From the vcpkg export documentation it states:

can be used on another machine without separately acquiring vcpkg

But we seem to be hitting multiple issues with this impromptu-SDK. We were seeing the issue missing triplets (because the triplets directory was not available).

> cmake ... -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=.../manifest-export-x64-windows/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake ...
error: Invalid triplet: x64-windows
Built-in Triplets:
Community Triplets:

I manually added the triplets/x64-windows.cmake under the example export and then it started complaining about vcpkg-tools.json and so on. Suffice it to say I'm not sure these standalone bundles are quite standalone with my current workflow and I'm hoping I've just missed a step along the way!

Question:

Is it assumed, that even with an exported manifest, that the target machine still requires a local bootstrapped version of vcpkg and, if so, how would one obtain that on a network without net access? Should we zip up a bootstrapped VCPKG_ROOT from another machine? Even if we do that, does vcpkg still require internet at random points along that process and it's still not possible?

[mccartnm]

When in doubt! Cheat!

Okay - so I've gone off the tracks a bit and explored the -DVCPKG_MANIFEST_INSTALL=OFF option which got us passed attempting to install anything and tap the internet. But obviously this causes the first find_package to fail since the packages aren't found (even with the manifest toolchain file being used.)

So I copied the vcpkg and <triplet> directory into the cmake build location under vcpkg_installed which mirrors what the external builds created and poof! Things started configuring!

Solution(ish)

So to recap:

• Generate vcpkg export for your triplet
• Bring exported manifest into network and unpack
• Copy all directories under <manifest-export>/installed/ to <cmake-build-location>/vcpkg_installed
• Execute cmake with toolchain and manifest install off:

    cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=.../<manifest-export>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_MANIFEST_INSTALL=OFF ...

This is all a bit cheeky but desperate times and all