An Artifactory impostor for Conan that redirects to GitHub.

Redirectory is a server for Conan packages, or a remote in Conan parlance. From the perspective of a Conan client, it is meant to be a drop-in replacement for Artifactory.

Redirectory works by using GitHub releases as free public storage. Uploading recipes and packages creates releases in a GitHub repository based on the package reference and attaches files as assets¹. Every revision of a recipe or package gets its own release². Installing recipes and packages looks up those releases and downloads their assets.

Redirectory packages are clearly identified by their references. Conan package references have the form ${name}/${version}@${user}/${channel}. Redirectory packages always have the user github and are hosted at the GitHub repository ${name} owned by ${channel}. For example, the package cupcake/0.2.0@github/thejohnfreeman is hosted at the GitHub repository thejohnfreeman/cupcake.

In the spirit of PyPI, NPM, crates.io, and Hackage, I run a free public Redirectory server at https://conan.jfreeman.dev to let open source developers like myself publish and share packages without the gatekeeping of Conan Center³ but free from the responsibility of operating a package server⁴.

Redirectory has been tested with Conan 1.x, with and without revisions enabled, and Conan 2.x, which always has revisions enabled.

Both uploading and downloading require the server to interact with the GitHub API. Downloading requires only read permissions, and the server supplies a shared token to serve downloads by unauthenticated users. GitHub rate limits tokens to 5000 requests per hour. A download of a recipe sends 3 or 4 requests, depending on whether your client has revisions enabled, and a download of a package sends an additional 1 or 2.

If you find the server cannot serve your downloads because the shared token is exhausted, then you can either wait for its limit to reset or you can supply your own GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT). If you never upload packages, then that token only needs the bare minimum read-only permissions. If you want to publish packages, then you must authenticate with that token and it needs to have write permissions for the GitHub repositories hosting your releases.

To create a PAT, navigate to your token settings and click "Generate new token". Give your token a name. If you want to publish packages through Redirectory, then under "Permissions" -> "Repository permissions", make sure it has read-write permissions for "Contents" (which will automatically include read-only permissions for "Metadata"). Otherwise, you can choose a "Public Repositories (read-only)" token under "Repository access". You can always change these decisions later by generating a new token and revoking the old one.

First, add the Redirectory server you want to use. My free public server is https://conan.jfreeman.dev.

conan remote add redirectory ${url}

Second, you can optionally authenticate to the server using a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) (see Authentication). Redirectory does not store this token⁵. It just echoes the token back to your Conan client, which stores it in your local Conan cache and includes it with every authenticated request it sends to Redirectory.

Copy the token and authenticate to Redirectory with your GitHub username:

conan user --remote redirectory ${owner} --password ${token}

All package references are of the form ${name}/${version}@github/${channel} where ${name} matches the name of a repository on GitHub, ${version} is a tag in that repository, and ${channel} is the owner of that repository.

You can search for available package versions:

conan search --remote redirectory ${name}

When you publish a package, Redirectory will create a tag and a release for you if none exists. It will add some metadata in an HTML comment in the description of that release. It is important that you never tamper with that comment.

To publish a package, first export it to your local Conan cache and then upload it to Redirectory.

conan export . github/${owner}
conan upload --remote redirectory ${name}/${version}@github/${owner}

After publishing a package, its files will not be immediately available for installation. You must wait for GitHub to percolate the asset state across its load balancer. In my experience, this can take up to 60 seconds.

If you want your package to be discoverable through conan search, then you'll need to add redirectory as a topic on your repository.