C++ - The Package Manager Conan

Conan is one of the most popular cross-platform package managers in cpp world. But it’s also HARD to use since it have a really bad documentation.

In this article, I’ll give some notes on how to use conan2.

Conan profile

As far as I know, conan profile (at least) defines the way how your machine builds the dependencies.

I just came across a problem related to language standard:

The package needs cstd=gnu17 to build, but I’m currently using gcc-15 which have cstd default to 23, and the installation fails due to that version-incompatibility. We need to tweak cstd to lower (such as gnu17 under which the package behaves normally). In conan docs, it’s very hard to find something you want because they all resides in conan reference.

Final solution was adding the following in your profile:

[conf]
tools.build:cflags=["-std=gnu17"]

Conanfile

There are two variants for defining a package:

• conanfile.txt
• conanfile.py

A basic conanfile.py file looks like this:

from conan import ConanFile

class YourRecipe(ConanFile):
    name = "project-name"
    version = "0.1"
    settings = "os", "compiler", "build_type", "arch" # Stay as not changed

    default_options = {
        "package/ver:opt": True, # Or False
    }

    requires = (
        "package1/ver",
    )

    generators = (
        "CMakeDeps",
        "CMakeToolchain",
    )

With the example above, you can install your dependencies by:

conan install . -of build -b missing -pr default # and other -pr you want to use

After that, use the following to configure cmake:

cmake --preset conan-release # or conan-debug and so and so forth
# you can provide other settings like -G "Ninja Multi-Config"