Introduction to Conan

NOTE: This course is for Conan 1.0, which is not the latest major Conan version. You might still do it and learn from it, if strictly necessary to keep using Conan 1, but the recommended major version is Conan 2. Go to the docs for more information. 

The new documentation for Conan 2 features a new interactive tutorial integrated in the docs

The introduction to Conan course is intended for developers with no previous exposure to Conan,  and provides simple explanations of Conan’s most fundamental innovations and benefits.  It shows how Conan abstracts away build systems, defines a “Project API” for C++ project, provides a repository system for multi-binary packages, and is the ideal building block for Continuous Integration workflows. By the end of the course, you’ll know what Conan is, who it’s for, and whether or not it’s something you and your team want to learn more about.

Additional Courses:
Conan Essentials - For C/C++ Developers
Conan Package Manager Advanced Course
Overview of Artifactory DevOps Tool

First up, conan has its roots in the open-source software ecosystem, so let's talk about that. When developing an applications in a team, each developer should be able to build the entire application from source, including its dependencies. Many large applications use multiple open source C and C++ projects, and unfortunately, they often have unique and complex build systems. This represents a substantial burden of time and complexity on each developer which hurts the team's ability to scale and evolve their dependencies. Conan aims to reduce and potentially eliminate this burden on the developer with the concept of a Conan recipe. For any given project, a Conan recipe captures the build instructions of that project for any build system, on any platform, and with any configuration. Once a Conan recipe has been written for each of the dependencies your team uses, your team no longer has to work with all the diverse and proprietary build systems directly. Your team can just call Conan with a single intuitive command syntax, and Conan handles the build systems for them. Furthermore, the Conan team and community have already created hundreds of recipes for many of the most popular and ubiquitous open-source libraries so you won’t have to.