Conan Joins JFrog

Conan.io, our favorite C/C++ package manager has just leaped into JFrog. This is one more great chapter in our story which began a few years ago, when JFrog products took a universal approach to provide developers the freedom of choice, using any technology they chose. With the recent addition PHP Composer, JFrog Artifactory currently supports the majority of  the most popular programming languages (according to the TIOBE index).

However, two of the most popular languages, C and C++, remained unsupported for a long time. Nevertheless, we do have many customers using Artifactory for C/C++ development. In most cases, they use features like generic repositories, custom layouts and properties to support their own proprietary solutions. The main reason C and C++ were second class citizens in Artifactory was that, unlike other technologies such as Java, .NET, NPM, Ruby and others, C and C++ did not have a good solution for package management. Although some tools offered solutions to meet this important need,  none of them managed to create a solid community around them.

A couple of months ago, some of our enterprise customers using C/C++ started talking about a promising new tool called conan.io. Conan provides true dependency management for C/C++ letting you both consume 3rd party libraries and define your own packages. As a tool targeting C/C++ developers, it deals with many unique requirements like conditional dependencies based on OS, compiler and other input. With the addition of a growing public repository of OSS packages ready to be consumed, this looked like something we wanted to know more about.

From the moment we met Diego Rodriguez-Losada Gonzalez, and Luis Martínez de Bartolomé, the founders of conan.io, we understood that we found the right tool and the right people to answer the ongoing need for C/C++ package management.

JFrog’s suite of products will now provide a complete solution for the management and distribution of C/C++ binaries with an enterprise-grade repository manager, security vulnerability detection,  licensing compliance management and first class software distribution.

As a first step, we are already working together to support Conan in Artifactory. This functionality will be released in one of the upcoming versions and will allow organizations to replace their proprietary solutions for C/C++ development with a powerful package manager supercharged with  an enterprise-grade repository manager supporting high availability, multisite development, CI integration and much more.

Based on our experience with technologies like NPM, Python, Java and others, we believe this alliance will change the way C/C++ development is done to let you release better software faster than before.

Stay tuned for our official announcement (coming real soon) about Artifactory’s support for Conan, and in the meantime, feel free to check out this great product at conan.io.