circleci_logo Circle CI

You can use Circle CI cloud to automatically build and test your project in Linux/macOS environments. It is free for OSS projects, and offers an easy integration with Github, so builds can be automatically fired in CircleCI after a git push to Github.

You can use CircleCI 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 CircleCI support to run the tests.

Clone the project from github:

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

Create a .circleci/config.yml file and paste this code in it:

version: 2
gcc-6:
  docker:
    - image: conanio/gcc6
  steps:
    - checkout
    - run:
        name: Build Conan package
        command: |
          sudo pip install --upgrade conan
          conan user
          conan create . user/channel
workflows:
  version: 2
  build_and_test:
    jobs:
    - gcc-6

CircleCI will install the conan tool and will execute the conan create command. Then, the script section creates the build folder, compiles the project with cmake and runs the tests.

Creating, testing and uploading conan package binaries

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

The command conan new has arguments to create a default working .circleci/config.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:

  1. 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, license and .gitignore.

  2. Get the credentials User and API Key (remember, Bintray uses the API key as “password”, not your main Bintray account password)

  3. Create a conan repository in Bintray under your user or organization, and get its URL (“Set me up”). We will call it UPLOAD_URL

  4. Under your project page, Settings -> Pipelines -> Add a variable, add the CONAN_PASSWORD environment variable with the Bintray API Key. If your Bintray user is different from the package user, you can define your Bintray username too, defining the environment variable CONAN_LOGIN_USERNAME

  5. Clone the repo: $ git clone <your_repo/hello> && cd hello

  6. Create the package: $ conan new Hello/0.1@<user>/testing -t -s -ciccg -ciccc -cicco -cis -ciu=UPLOAD_URL where user is your Bintray username

  7. You can inspect the created files: both .circleci/config.yml and the build.py script, that is used by conan-package-tools utility to split different builds with different configurations in different GitLab CI jobs.

  8. You can test locally, before pushing, with $ conan create

  9. Add the changes, commit and push: $ git add . && git commit -m "first commit" && git push

  10. Go to Pipelines page and see the pipeline, with the different jobs.

  11. When it finish, go to your Bintray repository, you should see there the uploaded packages for different configurations

  12. 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