Appveyor

You can use the AppVeyor cloud service to automatically build and test your project in a Windows environment in the cloud. It is free for OSS projects, and offers an easy integration with Github, so builds can be automatically fired in Appveyor after a git push to Github.

You can use Appveyor both for:

Building and testing your project, which manages dependencies with Conan, and probably a conanfile.txt file
Building and testing Conan binary packages for a given Conan package recipe (with a conanfile.py)

Building and testing your project

We are going to use an example with GTest package, with AppVeyor support to run the tests.

Clone the project from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/lasote/conan-gtest-example

Create an appveyor.yml file and paste this code in it:

version: 1.0.{build}
    platform:
      - x64

    install:
      - cmmd: echo "Downloading conan..."
      - cmmd: set PATH=%PATH%;%PYTHON%/Scripts/
      - cmmd: pip.exe install conan
      - cmmd: conan user # Create the conan data directory
      - cmmd: conan --version

    build_script:
      - cmmd: mkdir build
      - cmmd: conan install . -o gtest:shared=True
      - cmmd: cd build
      - cmmd: cmake ../ -DBUILD_TEST=TRUE  -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64"
      - cmmd: cmake --build . --config Release

    test_script:
      - cmmd: cd bin
      - cmmd: encryption_test.exe

Appveyor will install the Conan tool and will execute the conan install command. Then, the build_script section creates the build folder, compiles the project with cmake and the section test_script runs the tests.

Creating, testing and uploading Conan binary packages

You can use Appveyor to automate the building of binary packages, which will be created in the cloud after pushing to Github. You can probably set up your own way, but Conan has some utilities to help in the process.

The command conan new has arguments to create a default working appveyor.yml file. Other setups might be possible, but for this example we are assuming that you are using GitHub and also uploading your final packages to Bintray. You could follow these steps:

First, create an empty github repository. Let’s call it “hello”, for creating a “hello world” package. Github allows to create it with a Readme and .gitignore.
Get the credentials User and API Key. (Remember, Bintray uses the API key as “password”, not your main Bintray account password.)
Create a Conan repository in Bintray under your user or organization, and get its URL (“Set me up”). We will call it UPLOAD_URL
Activate the repo in your Appveyor account, so it is built when we push changes to it.
Under Appveyor Settings->Environment, add the CONAN_PASSWORD environment variable with the Bintray API Key, and encrypt it. If your Bintray user is different from the package user, you can define your Bintray username too, defining the environment variable CONAN_LOGIN_USERNAME
Clone the repo: $ git clone <your_repo/hello> && cd hello
Create the package: conan new Hello/0.1@<user>/testing -t -s -ciw -cis -ciu=UPLOAD_URL where user is your Bintray username
You can inspect the created files: both appveyor.yml and the build.py script, that is used by conan-package-tools utility to split different builds with different configurations in different appveyor jobs.
You can test locally, before pushing, with conan create
Add the changes, commit and push: git add . && git commit -m "first commit" && git push
Go to Appveyor and see the build, with the different jobs.
When it finish, go to your Bintray repository, you should see there the uploaded packages for different configurations
Check locally, searching in Bintray: conan search Hello/0.1@<user>/testing -r=mybintray

If something fails, please report an issue in the conan-package-tools github repository: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-package-tools