Conan and Conan Center: 2021 in numbers

2021 has been quite a busy year for Conan. We are working hard to get Conan 2.0 ready, almost 4
years after 1.0 was released. And, of course, the 1.X series is still very active, with 10
versions released during the year.

Conan Center has not lagged behind. In 2021, only two years after its inception, we
celebrated with our community a great milestone: in August, Conan Center
reached 1,000 recipes.

So Conan and Conan Center have come a long way over the last few years. Let’s take a look at some
numbers to see how much we have grown.

Conan

According to the ISO C++ 2021 survey,
Conan is the most used C and C++ language specific package manager.

So Conan is the most used, but how much? There are
a lot of ways to install Conan, and we don’t have data on
installs coming from mirrors. The most popular source, though, is PyPI, the Python package index.
In there, we are currently having around 500.000 monthly downloads.
Almost 520.000 in December.

The PyPI installs number must be taken just as an estimation. Their stats are kind of noisy
because of mirrors and other reasons.

But the true indicator of how healthy an Open Source project is in its GitHub activity. Here are
the number of Pull Requests over the last few years:

 
Conan
Conan Center

2019
758
397

2020
735
2607

2021
784
3493

Conan.io

The Conan website is the main source of information about Conan, and a good
measure to see how the usage of Conan evolves:

 
Page Views
Unique Users

2019
1.1M
184K

2020
2.0M
310K

2021
2.8M
490K

Page Views and Users:

The most visited part of our site, by far, is the documentation, accounting for 70% of all web traffic,
with bounce rate below 50% and average visit times:

It’s also worth noting that Conan has never used any ads, so most of our visits are organic, coming from search engines, but also the direct and referral traffic is very relevant:

Slack

Our channel in the CppLang slack server, #conan, is the 2nd most
used channel by members posting and the 4th most active by published messages.

Ranking of CppLang Slack Server Channels:

Conan Center

When we created Conan Center in August 2019, we were trying to fill a void in our ecosystem: back
then, the latest version of the Conan client was 1.18, so it was completely production-ready, but
we didn’t have our own package repository to handle dependencies straightforwardly. We
wanted for our users to be able to install open source libraries and tools by just adding a couple
of lines to their ConanFiles.

And we succeeded: as of today, the last days of 2021, we have 1,200 recipes in our repository.

This number is huge, but Conan Center is much, much more that the recipes, and here is some data
that describe our amazing community.

First things first, our contributors, the fuel of Conan Center. There are more than 500
contributors, who commited an average of 50 commits each week during 2021. Here are our most
active contributors, to whom we are most grateful:

Contributors ordered by number of commits

Contributor
Number of Commits

SpaceIM
1.346

madebr
1.010

ericLemanissier
699

uilianries
501

prince-chrismc
353

jgsogo
295

SSE4
273

intelligide
248

theirix
211

gocarlos
157

Commits and PR are not the only thing to be considered. Reviewing and debating how to improve
recipes is also extremely important. Here are our most active contributors ordered by number
of comments:

Contributor
Number of Comments

madebr
1.511

uilianries
1.372

SpaceIM
1.353

prince-chrismc
1.216

ericLemanissier
844

jgsogo
809

SSE4
809

Croydon
576

danimtb
543

mathbunnyru
213

And here is the evolution of PRs created:

Number of PRs and Unique Contributors:

Merged, rejected and open PRs over time:

Hours before a new PR is merged:

But Conan Center is not only a recipe repository. We also build and store binaries for the most
common configurations so our users don’t have to build their dependencies, which can take A LOT
of time. Those packages are stored in an Artifactory repository. Here are some numbers around it:

Total number of binaries
11.050.000
Total size of binaries
11.28TB

Of course, having all this in place would be pointless if anybody was using it. So let’s take a
look at how much data traffic is going through our remotes:

Daily Data Transfer (GB):

Monthly Data Transfer (GB):

And the number of individual requests:

Requests to the Conan Center repository:

Conan in production

Conan Center is our public repository of Open Source packages. But the main userbase for Conan
comes from companies using it on their own products, and there are no public statistics about
those teams. A good indicator, though, is the number of Artifactory instances hosting Conan
repositories:

This, of course, is only partial data to get an idea of how many teams are currently using Conan.
There are a lot of binary repositories we cannot get statistics from, like Artifactory instances
behind proxies, GitLab servers, Nexus servers, etc.

The future

The main milestone for 2022 will be, of course, the release of Conan 2.0. And it’s an enormous
milestone, not affecting only the client: we are also writing a completely updated documentation,
working on updating all the Conan Center recipes to be compatible with the new version, as well as
the whole Conan Center infrastructure (building bots, CI pipelines, validation hooks, etc.).

So stay tuned to get the last news about Conan and Conan Center!