What’s New in vcpkg (February 2024)

Augustin Popa

This blog post summarizes changes to the vcpkg package manager as part of the 2024.02.14 release and changes to vcpkg documentation throughout February. This month’s vcpkg release was mainly minor bug fixes, while several new documentation articles were added.

Some stats for this period:

• There are now 2,396 total libraries available in the vcpkg public registry.
• 22 new ports were added to the open-source registry. A port is a versioned recipe for building a package from source, such as a C or C++ library.
• 388 updates were made to existing ports. As always, we validate each change to a port by building all other ports that depend on or are depended by the library that is being updated for our 13 main triplets.
• 19 contributors submitted PRs, issues, or participated in discussions in the main repo.
• The main vcpkg repo has over 5,800 forks and 21,000 stars on GitHub.

vcpkg changelog (2024.02.24 release)

• The Arm64 for macOS community triplet (arm64-osx) was promoted to our CI testing suite. We will routinely test ports automatically with this triplet going forward. We automatically test any new or updated ports against 13 triplets.
• Fixed a regression in x-script for the asset caching feature (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1337).
• Various minor bugfixes.

Documentation changes

• New articles:
  • How-to: Test your custom registry ports using vcpkg with GitHub Actions: This article describes how to set up your own private libraries with vcpkg in a continuous integration environment using GitHub Actions.
  • How-to: Test your custom registry ports using vcpkg with Azure DevOps: This article describes how to set up your own private libraries with vcpkg in a continuous integration environment using Azure DevOps.
  • Tutorial: Package a private Azure DevOps dependency: Find out how to package an existing project hosted in Azure DevOps with vcpkg.
  • Troubleshoot asset caching issues: If you’re running into any issues using the asset caching feature, this article is for you.
• Added documentation for X_VCPKG_NUGET_PREFIX environment variable.
• Fixed references to renamed variable VCPKG_MAKE_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS -> VCPKG_CONFIGURE_MAKE_OPTIONS (thank you for reporting this issue, @KUGA2!).
• Documented an additional temporary file location in the README (thanks for reporting this issue, @davidmatson!).
• Fixed broken Markdown in vcpkg with Visual Studio Code tutorial (thanks for reporting this issue, @patrikhuber!).
• Fixed code snippets in articles about using vcpkg with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
• Various minor improvements throughout the docs.

If you have any suggestions for our documentation, please submit an issue in our GitHub repo or use the button “This page” at the bottom of a particular article.

Total ports available for tested triplets

While vcpkg supports a much larger variety of target platforms and architectures (as community triplets), the list above is validated exhaustively to ensure updated ports don’t break other ports in the catalog.

Thank you to our contributors

vcpkg couldn’t be where it is today without contributions from our open-source community. Thank you for your continued support! The following people contributed to the vcpkg, vcpkg-tool, or vcpkg-docs repos in this release:

• jiayuehua (57 commits)
• dg0yt (16 commits)
• Thomas1664 (10 commits)
• Neumann-A (10 commits)
• autoantwort (9 commits)
• SchaichAlonso (7 commits)
• moritz-h (4 commits)
• Osyotr (4 commits)
• m-kuhn (3 commits)
• omarhogni (2 commits)
• alagoutte (2 commits)
• Tradias (2 commits)
• danielaparker (2 commits)
• an-tao (2 commits)
• yurybura (2 commits)
• traversaro (2 commits)
• xiaozhuai (2 commits)
• HappySeaFox (1 commit)
• daschuer (1 commit)
• luncliff (1 commit)
• AenBleidd (1 commit)
• eao197 (1 commit)
• RT2Code (1 commit)
• chausner (1 commit)

Is your company looking for a better C/C++ dependency management experience?

We are partnering with companies to help them get started with vcpkg and overcome any initial hurdles. We have also been making product and documentation changes based on feedback we receive from these partnerships. If you are interested in trying out vcpkg or just have some thoughts to share with us, feel free to reach out at vcpkg@microsoft.com.

Learn more

You can find the full 2024.02.14 release notes on GitHub for the main repo. Recent updates to the vcpkg tool can be viewed on the vcpkg-tool Releases page. To contribute to documentation, visit the vcpkg-docs repo. If you’re new to vcpkg or curious about how a package manager can make your life easier as a C/C++ developer, check out the vcpkg website – vcpkg.io.

If you would like to contribute to vcpkg and its library catalog, or want to give us feedback on anything, check out our GitHub repo. Please report bugs or request updates to ports in our issue tracker or join more general discussion in our discussion forum.

Augustin Popa Senior Product Manager, Microsoft C++ Team

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