Authorization plugins

Warning

This feature is experimental and subject to breaking changes. See the Conan stability section for more information.

Regarding authorization, we have two plugins: one focused on remote Conan servers authorization, auth_remote.py, and another focused on authorization for source file servers, auth_source.py.

The idea behind these plugins is to create custom integrations with each user’s secrets managers.

Auth remote plugin

This first plugin is a Python script that receives a remote object and an optional parameter: user. If the user is provided, the expected output is the credentials that use that username. The output should be a tuple of the username that we want to use for that remote, or None if no credentials are specified for that remote and we want Conan to follow the normal login flow.

This plugin is located at the path <CONAN_HOME>/extensions/plugins/auth_remote.py and must be manually created with the name auth_remote.py, containing a function named auth_remote_plugin(remote, user=None, **kwargs).

The order for retrieving credentials is as follows:

  • First, an attempt is made to obtain the credentials from the auth_remote_plugin.

  • If it doesn’t exist or returns None, the next step is to check credentials.json.

  • After that, the environment variables are searched.

  • Finally, the credentials are obtained through an interactive prompt.

Here we can see an example of a plugin implementation.

  1. def auth_remote_plugin(remote, user=None, **kwargs):
  2. if remote.url.startswith("https://artifactory.my-org/"):
  3. return "admin", "password"

Auth source plugin

This one is a Python script that receives an url as a parameter and outputs a dictionary with the credentials or access token. It can also return None to indicate that Conan should proceed with its normal login flow.

This plugin is located at the path <CONAN_HOME>/extensions/plugins/auth_source.py and must be manually created with the name auth_source.py, containing a function named auth_source_plugin(url, **kwargs).

The order for retrieving the credentials is as follows:

  • First, an attempt is made to obtain the credentials from the auth_source_plugin.

  • If it doesn’t exist or returns None, an attempt is made to retrieve them from source_credentials.json.

Here we can see an example of a plugin implementation.

  1. def auth_source_plugin(url, **kwargs):
  2. if url.startswith("https://my-sources-user-password.my-org/"):
  3. return {'user': 'my-user', 'password': 'my-password'}
  4. elif url.startswith("https://my-private-token-sources.my-org/"):
  5. return {'token': 'my-secure-token'}

Note

These plugins can be shared and installed using conan config install or conan config install-pkg

Important: Ensure that your plugins and configurations do not contain hardcoded secrets or sensitive data. Instead, passwords should be retrieved using your implementation with a secret manager.