We are pleased to announce that Conan 1.54 is out and brings some significant new features and bug fixes. First, this release comes with a new ConanFile.win_bash_run attribute and a tools.microsoft.bash:active configuration to manage Windows bash more accurately. Also, the new ConanFile.upload_policy class method provides a way of skipping uploading binaries for a recipe. We added a new Git.included_files() method to get the files included in git that are not in the .gitignore. Finally, the distro package is added to the context of the Jinja global.conf template on Linux platforms.

Also, it’s worth noting that Conan 2.0-beta5 was released this month with several new features and fixes.

New ConanFile.win_bash_run attribute and tools.microsoft.bash:active

Since Conan 1.55 you can configure better how Conan interacts with Windows Subsystems in a more precise way:

  • ConanFile.win_bash_run. The win_bash_run attribute is equivalent to the win_bash one but for the run scope. That means that if you set win_bash_run=True all the commands that are invoked via self.run(cmd, scope="run") will run inside the bash shell.

  • tools.microsoft.bash:active. Using tools.microsoft.bash:active you can define if Conan is already running inside a subsystem (Msys2) terminal. Then, any command that runs with self.run (also depending on the value of win_bash_run and win_bash) will run that command explicitly in the bash if tools.microsoft.bash:active is not defined or False.

New ConanFile.upload_policy

Sometimes, you may want to skip uploading Conan packages to the remote. The most typical case is packages that download huge binary tools (android-ndk or similar). In this case, it would not make much sense to repackage those binaries into a .tgz Conan package which can take a significant amount of time. For these cases, you can set the upload_policy class attribute in the ConanFile to the value skip.


...

class AndroidNDKConan(ConanFile):
    name = "android-ndk"
    ...
    upload_policy = 'skip'
    ...

Then, if you upload the Conan package to the server, the recipe is uploaded but not any binaries:


➜ conan upload android-ndk/r25@ -c --all -r myremote
android-ndk/r25: Skipping upload of binaries, because upload_policy='skip'
...
Uploaded conan recipe 'android-ndk/r25' to 'myremote': https://...

This policy works together with the build_policy = "missing", if binaries are not being uploaded, it is likely that we want those binaries to be automatically “built” (though they are typically not built from source, just download a large archive with pre-compiled binaries), and not require an explicit --build in the command line.

New Git.included_files() method

This new Git tool method returns the list of files not in the .gitignore list. It can be practical if, for example, you want to implement an export of just those files:


from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.scm import Git

...

class MyPackages(ConanFile):
    ...

    def export_sources(self):
        git = Git(self)
        included = git.included_files()
        for i in included:
            dst =  os.path.join(self.export_sources_folder, i)
            os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(dst), exist_ok=True)
            shutil.copy2(i, dst)

Add distro package to Jinja context in global.conf

As you may know, you can use the the Jinja2 template engine in the global.conf. When Conan loads this file, immediately parses and renders the template, which must result in a standard tools-configuration text. The Python packages passed to render the template for all the platforms are os and platform. Since version 1.55 the distro package is also passed for Linux. That can be very useful if you have a configuration that depends on the Linux distribution. You could set the default profiles depending on the distribution in the global.conf file, for example:

...

core:default_profile={{distro.id()}}

...

Then, Conan will use a profile named after the distribution name (ubuntu, debian, centos…) as the default host profile name.

Conan 2.0-beta5 released

We have just released Conan 2.0 beta5. You can install it using pip:

$ pip install conan --pre

This new beta comes with several new features and fixes. Some of those features are:

  • Improvements in the remotes management and API.
  • Simplifying compress and uncompress of .tgz files and also preserving timestamps for uncompressed files.
  • Improvements in lockfiles: new LockfileAPI and lockfiles generation in conan export.

Please check the documentation for Conan 2.0 if you want to start trying the new features.


Besides the items listed above, there were some minor bug fixes you may wish to read about. If so please refer to the changelog for the complete list.

We hope you enjoy this release and look forward to your feedback.