Migrating an existing C++ codebase to conan

This is a bit of a battle report of migrating the dependencies in my C++ projects to use the conan package manager .

In the past weeks I have started to use conan in half a dozen both work and personal projects. Here’s my experiences so far.

Before

The first real project I started with was my personal game project . The “before” setup used a mixture if techniques to handle dependencies and uses CMake to do most of the heavy lifting.

Most dependencies reside in the “devenv”, which is a separate CMake project that I use to build and bundle the dependencies in a specific installation folder. It uses ExternalProject_Add for most parts (e.g. Boost, SDL, Lua, curl and OpenSSL), add_subdirectory for a few others (pugixml and lz4) and just install(FILES...) for a few header only libs like JSON for Modern C++, Catch2 and spdlog. It should be noted that there are relatively few interdependencies between the projects in there.

Because it is more convenient to update, I keep a few dependencies that I control myself directly in the source tree, either as git externals or just copies of the source files.

I try to keep usage of system dependencies to a minimum so that the resulting binary is more portable to the average gamer who does not want to know about libraries and dependencies and such nonsense. This setup has been has been mostly painless and working for my three platforms Windows, Linux and Mac – at least as long as I did not try to change it significantly.

Baby steps

Since not all my dependencies are available on conan and small iterations are usually more successful, I decided to proceed by changing only a single dependency to conan. For this dependency, it’s a good idea to pick something that does not have many compile-time options and is more or less platform agnostic. So I opted for boost over, e.g. SDL or wxWidgets. Boost was also one of the most painful dependencies to build, if only for the insane amount of files it produces and the time it takes to copy those ten-thousands of files to the install location.

Getting started..

There are currently two popular variants of boost available through conan. The “normal” variant on conan’s main repository/remote “conan-center” and a modular version that splits boost into its component libraries on the bincrafters remote, e.g. Boost.Filesystem . The modular version is more appealing conceptually, and I also had a better time getting it to work in my first tests, so I picked that. I did a quick grep for #include <boost/ through my code for an initial guess which boost libraries I needed to get and created a corresponding conanfile.txt in my project root.

[requires]
boost_filesystem/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_math/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_random/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_property_tree/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_assign/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_heap/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_optional/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_program_options/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_iostreams/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable
boost_system/1.69.0@bincrafters/stable

[options]
boost:shared=False

[generators]
cmake

Now conan plays really nice with “single configuration generators” like the new CMake/Ninja support in VS2017 and onward. Basically, just cd into your build dir and call something like conan install -s build_type=Debug -s build_type=x86 whenever you want to update dependencies. More info can be found in the official documentation . The workflow for CLion is essentially the same.

Using it in your build

After the last command, conan will download (or build) the dependencies and generate a file with all the corresponding paths.

To use it, include it from cmake like this:

include(${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/conanbuildinfo.cmake)
conan_basic_setup(TARGETS KEEP_RPATHS)

It will then provide targets for all the requested boost libraries that you can link to like this:

target_link_libraries(myTarget
  PUBLIC CONAN_PKG::boost_filesystem
)

I wanted to make sure that the compiler build using the new boost files and not the old ones. Because I have a generic include into my devenv that was still going to be in my compilers include-paths for all the other dependencies, so I just renamed boost’s header include folder on disc. After my first successful compile I felt confident enough to delete them.

First problems

There was one major problem: some of my in-source dependencies had their own claim on using boost via passed CMake variables, Boost_LIBRARY_DIRS and Boost_INCLUDE_DIR . I adapted their CMakeLists.txt to allow for injecting appropriate targets instead. Not the cleanest solution, but it got my builds green again fast.

There’s a still a lot to cover on this: The other platforms had their own quirks and I migrated way more than just this first project. Also, there is still ways to go for a full migration with my game project. But more on that in my next blog post…