Hacking Together a Conan Package

This is how I hacked together a Conan package for use with my Windows console project. I wasn’t concerned with having Conan automatically build the project’s code, instead I wanted to compile the code myself and publish the resulting files so that my project could use them.

I wrote about this over a year ago when I first started using Conan, but my understanding then was even less than it is now (and it’s still pretty minimal). I had to revisit this recently and I wanted to write up a more concise step-by-step guide on how I did this in case I have to do it again in another year.

Prerequisites

My username on bintray.com is zethon (surprise) and before I started this process I had already created a remote repository on bintray.com called arcc.

Step-By-Step

1. Build the source code - This step should be obvious. In my case the results were some header files and a single *.lib file.

2. Create a new folder for the package - In this case I created c:\src\conan-pdcurses since I wanted to package PDCurses.

3. Create a basic conanfile.py file - Luckily I still had the code from last year when I did this with my other project. The file ended up looking like this:

from conans import ConanFile, tools

class PDCursesConan(ConanFile):
    name = "pdcurses"
    version = "3.9"
    settings = "os", "compiler", "build_type", "arch"
    description = "<Description of Libtidy here>"
    url = "None"
    license = "None"

    def package(self):
        self.copy("*.h", dst="include", keep_path=False)
        self.copy("*.a", dst="lib", keep_path=False)
        self.copy("*.lib", dst="lib", keep_path=False)

    def package_info(self):
        self.cpp_info.libs = tools.collect_libs(self)

1. Create the package’s folders - I created the following folders:
   c:\src\conan-pdcurses\package\lib</br> c:\src\conan-pdcurses\package\include

2. Copy the header and library files into the folder inside package - For PDCurses there were a couple of header files in multiple directories. I maintained that folder structure when I copied everything over.

3. conan install . - Run this command in the folder that you created in Step 2. This creates a few files that Conan uses.

4. conan package . --package-folder=package - This step may be redundant and/or unncessary but I ran it anyway. I have not tried this process without it.

5. conan export-pkg . pdcurses/3.9@zethon/stable - This creates the manifest file, which is necessary for uploading.

6. conan upload pdcurses/3.9@zethon/stable -r arcc --all - Finally we upload the package to the remote repository!

Oh wait, there’s a problem…

PDCurses was the first custom Conan package I needed for this project, and therefore the first package I attempted to add to the arcc repository in my bintray.com account. When I ran Step 9 above I was met with this message:

Uploading pdcurses/3.9@zethon/stable to remote 'arcc'
Please log in to "arcc" to perform this action. Execute "conan user" command.
If you don't have an account sign up here: https://bintray.com/signup/oss
Remote 'arcc' username: zethon
Please enter a password for "zethon" account: <redacted>

My first thought was to use my bintray.com credentials, which did not work. Actually, the prompt that asked me to login didn’t even work; instead it just hung whenever I entered my password.

After a bit of searching, I discovered that I had to authenticate using an API Key. The API Key can be found in bintrary.com by hovering over your username and selecting Edit Profile and then selecting API Key on the left. Once I had the API key I was ready to authenticate the remote on my local machine:

conan user -p <API KEY> -r arcc zethon

Once I did that I was able to run Step 9 succesfully.

Conclusion

After this was all done I was able to include PDCurses (in my Windows build only! as pdcurses/3.9@zethon/stable.