Setting Up Conan

Conan is a C/C++ package manager that speeds up the integration of C or C++ libraries into your own project. It's available on all the supported development platforms.

Conan can be integrated into most build systems that are integrated into Qt Creator:

• CMake
• Qbs
• qmake
• Meson

The client-server architecture of Conan enables the client to fetch packages from and upload them to remote servers that act as package storage. The client creates the packages, and if necessary, handles building them from sources. Because the client has a local cache for package storage, you can work offline, as long as no new packages are needed from remote servers.

To use Conan, install it by using the Qt installer or the tools that your operating system has. For example, on Windows, you can use the choco install conan or pip install conan command.

To enable the experimental Conan plugin, select Help > About Plugins > Utilities > Conan. Then select Restart Now to restart Qt Creator and load the plugin.

For each project, you must write a conanfile.py or conanfile.txt file that specifies the needed libraries and packages. Then, you must edit the build settings of the project to specify the location of the file and the contents of the Conan install command. For more information, see Conan Build Steps.

Alternatively, you can automatically set up the Conan package manager for use with CMake. For more information, see Using CMake with Conan.