conan alias

$ conan alias [-h] reference target

Creates and exports an ‘alias package recipe’.

An “alias” package is a symbolic name (reference) for another package (target). When some package depends on an alias, the target one will be retrieved and used instead, so the alias reference, the symbolic name, does not appear in the final dependency graph.

positional arguments:
  reference   Alias reference. e.g.: mylib/1.X@user/channel
  target      Target reference. e.g.: mylib/1.12@user/channel

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

The command:

$ conan alias hello/0.X@user/testing hello/0.1@user/testing

Creates and exports a package recipe for hello/0.X@user/testing with the following content:

from conans import ConanFile

class AliasConanfile(ConanFile):
    alias = "hello/0.1@user/testing"

Such package recipe acts as a “proxy” for the aliased reference. Users depending on hello/0.X@user/testing will actually use version hello/0.1@user/testing. The alias package reference will not appear in the dependency graph at all. It is useful to define symbolic names, or behaviors like “always depend on the latest minor”, but defined upstream instead of being defined downstream with version-ranges.

The “alias” package should be uploaded to servers in the same way as regular package recipes, in order to enable usage from servers.