Using ConanCenter packages in production environments

Note

Default Remote Update in Conan 2.9.2

Starting from Conan version 2.9.2, the default remote has been changed to https://center2.conan.io. The previous default remote https://center.conan.io is now frozen and will no longer receive updates. It is recommended to update your remote configuration to use the new default remote to ensure access to the latest recipes and package updates (for more information, please read this post).

If you still have the deprecated remote configured as the default, please update using the following command:

conan remote update conancenter --url="https://center2.conan.io"

ConanCenter is a fantastic resource that contains reference implementations of recipes for over 1500 libraries and applications contributed by the community. As such, it is a great knowledge base on how to create and build Conan packages for open source dependencies.

ConanCenter also builds and provides binary packages for a wide range of configurations: multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS), compilers, compiler versions, and library variants (shared, static). On top of this, for a lot of libraries community contributors ensure that recipes are compatible for additional operating systems (Android, iOS, FreeBSD, QNX) and CPU architectures. The recipes in Conan Center are the greatest example of Conan’s universality promise.

Unlike other package managers or repositories, ConanCenter does not maintain a fixed snapshot of versions. On the contrary, for a given library (e.g. OpenCV), multiple versions are actively maintained at the same time. This gives users greater control of which versions to use, rather than having to remain fixed to an older version, or pushing them to always be on the latest version.

In order to support this ecosystem, ConanCenter recipes are updated very frequently. Recipes themselves may be updated to support a new platform, bug fixes, or to require newer versions of their dependencies. On the other hand, each user of ConanCenter may have a different combination of versions in their requirements. This means that given the same input list of requirements, Conan may resolve the graph differently at different points in time - resolving to different recipe revisions, versions, or packages. This is similar to the default behavior of package managers in other languages (pip/PyPi, npm, cargo, etc). In production environments where reproducibility is important, it is therefore discouraged to depend directly on Conan Center in an unconstrained manner.

The following guidelines contain a series of recommendations to ensure repeatability, reliability, compliance and, where applicable, control to enable customization. As a summary, it is highly recommended to follow these approaches when using packages from ConanCenter:

Repeatability and reproducibility

As mentioned earlier - given a set of requirements, changes in ConanCenter can cause the Conan dependency solver to resolve different graphs over time. This does not only apply to the actual versions of libraries (e.g. opencv/4.5.0 instead opencv/4.2.1) - but also the recipes themselves. That is, there may exist multiple revisions of the opencv/4.5.0 recipe, which can have side effects for consumers. Changes in recipes typically address a problem (bugfixes), target functionality (e.g. adding a conditional option, support for a new platform), or change versions of dependencies.

In order to ensure repeatability, the use of lockfiles on the consumer side is greatly encouraged: please check the lockfile docs for more information.

Lockfiles ensure that Conan will resolve the same graph in a repeatable and consistent manner - thus making sure the same versions are used across multiple systems (CI, developers, etc).

Lockfiles are also used in other package managers like Python pip, Rust Cargo, npm - these recommendations are in line with the practices of these other technologies.

Additionally, it is highly recommended to host your recipes and packages in your own server (see below). Both of these approaches help you achieve having control on when upstream changes from ConanCenter are propagated across your team and systems.

Service reliability

Consuming recipes and packages from the ConanCenter remote can be impacted during periods of downtime (scheduled or otherwise). While every effort is made to ensure that the ConanCenter is always available, and unscheduled downtime is rare and treated with urgency - this can impact users that depend on ConanCenter directly. Additionally, when building recipes from source, this requires retrieving the source packages (typically zip or tar files) from remote servers outside of the control of ConanCenter. Occasionally, these too can suffer from unscheduled downtime.

In enterprise production environments with strong uptime is required, it is strongly recommended to host recipes and binary packages in a server under your control.

This can also protect against transient network issues, and issues caused by transfer of binary data from external sources. These recommendations also apply when consuming packages from external sources in any package manager.

Compliance and security

Some industries such as finance, robotics and embedded, have stronger requirements around change management, open source licenses and reproducibility. For example, changes in recipes could result in a new version being resolved for a dependency, in a way that the license for that version has changed and needs to be validated and audited by your organization. In some industries like medical or automotive, you may be required to ensure all your dependencies can be built from source in a repeatable way, and thus using binaries provided by Conan Center may not be advisable. In these instances, we recommend building your own binary packages from source:

Control and customization

It is very common for users of dependencies to require custom changes to external libraries - typically to support specific platform configurations not considered by either ConanCenter or the original library authors, backport bug fixes, etc. Some of these changes may not be suitable to be merged in ConanCenter, and it may not happen until this has been reviewed and validated by ConanCenter maintainers. For this reason, if you need tight control over the changes in recipes, it is highly recommended to host not only a Conan remote, but your own fork of the conan-center-index recipe repository.

The following subsections describe in more details the above strategies: