Free Conan Training Series on JFrog Academy
Today we are very excited to announce a new milestone in the Conan project. We have now published our very own self-paced interactive training courses online, free to anyone who is interested in learning Conan. The courses are hosted on JFrog’s very own learning platform: JFrog Academy, which also features a wide variety of courses on other related topics.
Introductory Video
We’ve created this short video providing an introduction and preview of the training series.
Motivation
The courses are adapted from the interactive training sessions we’ve held at CPPCon and online over the past two years. These trainings were very successful with 20 sessions in 2 different time zones and 460 unique trainees total. It was also highly rated with 70% of trainees rating it “excellent” and 25% rating it “very good”. The online sessions had limited capacity and all filled up within a few days of being announced resulting in a waiting list. It quickly became very clear that creating and offering a self-paced training strategy was the right thing for scale, and the JFrog Academy was the perfect platform for us to create it on. Now, anyone can enjoy the training without restrictions on time zones or availability.
Learning Format
The courses feature interactive exercises which walk users through the running of commands, exploring and editing of important Conan-related files and directories, and quizzes to invoke critical thinking after each section. Thanks to the JFrog Academy platform, we’ve now made these courses self-paced and available to be done on your own schedule.
Introduction to Conan
The first course is named “Introduction to Conan.” It is very short, and intended for developers with no previous exposure to Conan, and provides simple explanations of Conan’s most fundamental innovations and benefits. It shows how Conan abstracts away build systems, defines a “Project API” for C++ project, provides a repository system for multi-binary packages, and is the ideal building block for Continuous Integration workflows.
Conan Essentials
The second course is named “Conan Essentials”. It is intended for developers with little-to-no Conan experience and will take you through a series of interactive exercises demonstrating Conan’s most basic features. Along the way, we’ll explain fundamental Conan concepts such as “Package ID”, “generators”, “settings”, “options”, and “profiles”, as well as the basic anatomy of the “Conanfile”. By the end of the course trainees will have enough experience to start working with Conan as part of their daily development process.
Conan Advanced
The third course is named “Conan Advanced” and is intended for users who have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of Conan. This includes users who have already gone through our “Essentials” course, and users who have been using Conan’s basic features for real-world development. The course begins with advanced scenarios surrounding requirements management. For example, the handling of version and configuration conflicts, conditional requirements, and the special features of “build requirements” and “python requirements”. It also covers advanced versioning topics such as the use of semantic versioning, version ranges, Conan’s built-in revisioning system, and Conan’s Lockfile feature. Finally, it includes a deeper dive into the topics of Conan configuration and Package ID. By the end of the course, trainees will have a deeper understanding of how these advanced features are intended to be used, and how they can solve some of the more challenging real-world scenarios that emerge when using Conan at Scale.
Conan CI/CD
The fourth course will be titled “Conan CI/CD” and is still in production. This course will be intended for users who build automated build pipelines with Conan on CI services in enterprise environments. The exercises in this course feature a collection C and C++ libraries and applications which have are being built automatically on a CI server, with Conan at the Center of the process. It features a realistic environment featuring a GIT repository, Conan Repository, and Jenkins CI Server instance. It also uses a common development flow using GIT branches, pull requests, and merges. The exercises demonstrate how each commit can be built and tested, and then followed by the build and test of all consumers, before finally doing a merge and “artifact promotion” at the end of the workflow. Crucially, it shows how each commit is run through this entire pipeline in complete isolation, ensuring that all changes are tested individually. By the end of the course, trainees will have a deep understanding of the key features of Conan revisions and Lockfiles, and how they represent the ideal cornerstone of automated build pipelines for C and C++.
Accessing the Conan Series at JFrog Academy
Here is the link to the Conan series landing page:
This page shows all the currently available Conan courses. With that said, we encourage everyone to checkout the entire catalog of courses in JFrog Academy.
Access to the courses requires a signup, but it’s completely free to register.
Also of note, the training courses require the use of Docker. All necessary docker commands are provided in the courses, so trainees do not need to be experienced with Docker prior to starting them, but it does need to be installed.
Support, Feedback and Improvement
We already have a lot of ideas for improving all of our courses over time and are constantly looking for feedback from attendees. If you have any questions during the training, please open an issue under the following Github repository:
Conan Training Repository on Github
This repository contains all the content for all the exercises in both the Essentials and Advanced courses, and so it’s also the best place to report any sort of feedback relating to existing courses, or even suggesting new ones.
As you complete the courses, if you enjoyed them and want to help spread the word, there are links to promote them on X and LinkedIn.
Stay tuned for more updates about new courses and updates to existing courses in the coming months!