JFrog Bintray Adds Support for Conan C/C++ Repositories and Launches Conan-center Managed Central Repository.

UPDATE: As of May 1, 2021 Bintray services will no longer be available (ConanCenter and JCenter are not affected) for more information read the Centers Deprecation Blog

We are very excited to announce support for Conan repositories on JFrog Bintray, the Universal Distribution Platform. Currently serving more than 2 Billion downloads per month, Bintray offers developers the fastest and most reliable way to publish and consume software releases.  In addition, JFrog will soon launch conan-center which will become the central public repository for Conan packages and the ultimate resource for OSS packages for C/C++ development.

Conan.io: Current challenges

Since being launched, Conan gained popularity as a package manager for C/C++ developers, and conan.io quickly became the central public repository for Conan C/C++ packages.  However, one of the problems with conan.io is that it is not moderated or curated. Every registered user can freely upload packages leading to variable quality of packages that conan.io hosts. Some packages met acceptable standards of  software quality, but others didn’t. Furthermore, some packages were uploaded multiple times by different developers, which confused some of our users.

Conan.io also lacks some very important features necessary to manage OSS project releases, like organizations and access control. Particularly lacking is a public API to facilitate automation and integrating its usage into development and DevOps flows.

Conan repos in Bintray: Benefits

With support for Conan repositories, Bintray offers a stable, reliable and convenient platform where  C/C++ developers and DevOps engineers can host their software packages. With Bintray, Conan users get the following features for their software packages:

1. They can create and manage any number of their own Conan repositories in Bintray, with fine grained user and permissions management, and new ways of collaborating.
2. A rich REST API gives them full  control over every aspect of their software distribution. They can manage access to their content, collect logs and analytics, upload and download files, create access keys and entitlements and more.
3. A scalable, robust, and safe platform with CDN (US and EU clusters) to provide enterprise grade performance and reliability with data being backed up and replicated over multiple cloud providers.
4. Bintray will also provide trust based signing of packages based on developers’ public identity (github)

And since it’s likely that C/C++ developers and DevOps also use other technologies, they will be happy know that as a universal distribution platform, JFrog Bintray supports most major package formats –  including Docker, npm, RPM, NuGet, Vagrant, Debian and more.

Conan-center

In addition to user repositories, we are launching conan-center, the new central public repository for Conan C/C++ packages. Conan-center is a curated repository, that will accept inclusion-requests from user repositories, to create a free, trusted, maintained and high quality central repository of OSS C/C++ packages.

Within the next few weeks, we will be taking steps to migrate the current central repository hosted at conan.io to conan-center on Bintray. Details about the process and steps you need to take if you have packages currently hosted on conan.io will soon be available in the Conan documentation, so stay tuned. 

If you run into any issues, you are welcome to contact us at info@conan.io.

With Conan repositories and conan-center, Bintray provides the next generation of conan servers for worldwide distribution of packages for the C and C++ communities. Start using them today in on bintray.com.