Conan leaps forward and joins JFrog
Today, we are very happy and excited to share some great news with our users and community; we are joining JFrog as full-time Senior Software Engineers to work on the open source Conan C and C++ package manager. This amazing step forward has been made possible thanks to all of Conan’s contributors, friends, and users.
Where we come from
Conan was launched almost a year ago, and from the initial versions, it got good reviews. People liked it, what it proposed, and started to use it and give feedback which greatly helped us improve Conan as we continued its development. Conan started to gain traction.
Very soon, we got some feature requests to support Artifactory as a backend and also about the possibility of using Bintray to host Conan packages for distribution. We already knew about Artifactory and liked it, and were really impressed with the fact that every single company using it had the same feedback: “Conan rocks, but we would love to be able to use it with Artifactory.”
Since its launch, Conan has been growing steadily and now supports thousands of downloads and active users per month, with package downloads peaking at more than 60K over the last month. There are currently over 750 packages in the public conan.io repository (some of them with hundreds of different binaries for different settings, OSs and compilers), however, the heaviest usage is not on conan.io as a remote repository, but rather, from companies using the conan_server on premises. We don’t have exact figures since we do not have telemetry or stats in Conan or conan_server, but we can deduce this from the level of activity we see and number of emails that we get from these companies.
Compared to other languages, a C and C++ package manager is a different beast. Many industries, including banking, embedded, gaming and more use C and C++, and the needs of companies wanting to use Conan were much greater than what we could provide with our “conan_server.”
And then, we met JFrog and started talking about our products, and especially about our respective visions. We quickly realized that we had many things in common and that it had much more sense to make this trip together. Joining forces to accelerate growth became the natural way to go.
An exciting journey ahead
So, from now on, we will be able to work full time on the Conan open source C and C++ package manager, but more importantly, we will be backed up by a company that reaches many developers around the world. This will allow us to extend our own reach much further, not only technically, but also in giving better service and support. The strength of a project like this depends on its community, and with JFrog, we will be able to take our community to a new level with things like 24/7 support and solid DevOps practices like those used in Bintray.
With Artifactory, Conan will graduate to best-in-class enterprise features such as high availability, multisite replication, proxies, signed packages and more. Companies, where development is distributed over different teams, will be able to use fine-grained access control, and DevOps will enjoy a great ecosystem of tools and connections like Continuous Integration provided by Artifactory. And the best part is that all of this is integrated into a universal solution for all programming languages and package managers - maven, npm, pip, docker, bundler, composer…
JFrog is a company very committed to open source, not only in words, but also in deeds. JFrog Artifactory is used by many of the world’s leading OSS projects and thousands of developers. With their support, they will keep Conan growing as a healthy open source project and guarantee its future far beyond what we could have done alone.
So this is very exciting news, but it’s only the beginning. If you’re new to Conan or new to Artifactory, don’t wait. Join us and let’s leap forward together.