Conan
By JFrog / Conan community
Conan is an open-source package manager for C and C++ that automates downloading, building, and linking binary or source dependencies across different compilers, platforms, and build configurations. It addresses C and C++'s historical lack…
Definition
Conan is an open-source package manager for C and C++ that automates downloading, building, and linking binary or source dependencies across different compilers, platforms, and build configurations. It addresses C and C++'s historical lack of a standardized dependency management story by letting teams declare required libraries in a recipe file and reuse precompiled binaries matched to a specific compiler and settings combination.
Overview
Conan exists because C and C++, unlike many newer languages, never shipped with an official package manager, leaving developers to manually download, compile, and link third-party libraries or rely on operating-system package managers that rarely offered consistent versions across platforms. Conan fills this gap by providing a dependency management system built specifically around C and C++'s unusual requirement that binaries must match not just a version but also the compiler, standard library, architecture, and build type used to produce them. Mechanically, Conan organizes dependencies around recipes, Python-based files that describe how to fetch a library's source, build it, and package the resulting binaries along with metadata about the exact settings used. When a project requests a dependency, Conan computes a hash from the combination of compiler, version, architecture, and build configuration, then checks local and remote binary caches for a matching precompiled package before falling back to building from source if no match exists. This binary-matching model is what lets Conan avoid the lengthy compile times C++ projects would otherwise face for every dependency on every machine. Among C and C++ dependency tools, Conan competes most directly with vcpkg, Microsoft's package manager, and with lower-level build-integration tools like CMake's FetchContent. Conan differentiates itself with a more general package format, support for private and public binary repositories, and compatibility with multiple build systems beyond CMake, whereas vcpkg is more tightly coupled to Microsoft's tooling ecosystem, though vcpkg has strong first-party support on Windows. In practice, teams use Conan to manage complex C++ dependency graphs across multiple platforms and compiler versions in a single build pipeline, often hosting private Conan repositories for internal libraries alongside public dependencies from Conan Center, the community's central package index. It is common in game development, embedded systems, and cross-platform desktop applications where a project must build consistently across Windows, Linux, and macOS toolchains. The trade-offs include a learning curve around Conan's settings and profile system, since a mismatched compiler or build type produces a cache miss requiring a full rebuild, and the overhead of maintaining recipes for libraries that lack official Conan Center packages. Some smaller projects find Conan's flexibility unnecessary and stick with simpler approaches like git submodules or CMake's built-in dependency fetching. Teams with straightforward, single-platform builds sometimes find a lighter-weight tool sufficient instead of adopting Conan's full package management model. Because Conan treats a project's exact compiler, standard library, and build configuration as part of a dependency's identity, teams get reproducible builds across CI and local machines at the cost of needing correctly configured Conan profiles for each target environment they support.
Key Features
- Manages binary and source dependencies matched to specific compiler settings
- Uses Python-based recipes to define how libraries are built and packaged
- Computes settings-based hashes to find matching precompiled binaries
- Supports multiple build systems including CMake, Meson, and Autotools
- Hosts a central public package index called Conan Center
- Allows private repositories for internal or proprietary libraries
- Falls back to building from source when no binary match exists
- Supports cross-compilation profiles for multiple target platforms