[question] Recommended way to mirror CCI recipes with source changes

[Totollie]

What is your question?

Hi team, I am looking into the best way to use CCI as a part of my group. We have a few challenges that make it potentially less straightforward. We will need to mirror all of the binaries from external vendor sites to our own storage for various checks, before they are consumed by Conan. By mirroring the binaries internally, we will be reducing risk from those binaries changing upstream and quietly invalidating those checks. Taking CMake as an example, the recipe's conandata.yml lists several download URLs for the binary contents. In this case we would want to copy those binaries into a similar path in our storage, run checks against those binaries separately, and have Conan fetch the binaries from that storage instead of the links checked into CCI. We would likely want to do similar with source repositories.

What would be the recommended approach to handle this? Should we fork CCI, patch the recipes, and rebase regularly (are there examples of this being done)? Or is there a mechanism within Conan 2 to replace a given set of URLs with another one? Thank you!

Have you read the CONTRIBUTING guide?

• I've read the CONTRIBUTING guide

[memsharded]

Hi @Totollie

Thanks for your question.

Have you checked this section in the docs? https://docs.conan.io/2/devops/using_conancenter.html

There it recommends for some production cases not to mirror the binaries, but to actually build them in the org CI and upload your own binaries to your own private server.

The "local-recipes-index" feature in https://docs.conan.io/2/devops/devops_local_recipes_index.html is intended to use a fork of conan-center-index more easily to build the binaries.

Then, a different issue is the URLs of the external sources, there are 2 different strategies here:

• To replace them in conandata.yml before building your own binaries, pointing to your own copy of the sources
• Use the "sources backup" feature: https://docs.conan.io/2/devops/backup_sources/sources_backup.html (blog post in https://blog.conan.io/2023/10/03/backup-sources-feature.html)

Please let me know if this helps.