Introducing the Local-Recipes-Index: A New Repository Type in Conan
ConanCenter, the central open-source repository for C and C++ libraries, is a success story, containing a vast collection of C and C++ open-source packages. It processes hundreds of thousands of download requests daily, building its packages from a central GitHub repository, which is organized in a specific folder layout and received nearly 6,000 pull requests from contributors in 2023 alone.
However, ConanCenter does not fit all use cases. For instance, it cannot include closed-source libraries or tools that might still be beneficial to the community. Additionally, some organizations, particularly large enterprises, prefer not to use binaries downloaded from the internet. Instead, they build their own binaries in-house using the conan-center-index recipes. These organizations often need to customize these recipes to meet unique requirements that are not applicable to the broader community, making such contributions unsuitable for the upstream repository. The Conan documentation acknowledges this practice, recommending working from a fork of conan-center-index for such needs.
For all those reasons in version 2.2.0, Conan introduced a new repository type called local-recipes-index, designed to offer more flexibility by allowing a Conan remote to point to a local copy of Conan recipes with a specific layout.
