FAQ
- Troubleshooting

FAQ

Troubleshooting

ERROR: Missing prebuilt package

When installing packages (with conan install or conan create) it is possible that you get an error like the following one:

ERROR: Missing binary: zlib/1.2.11:b1d267f77ddd5d10d06d2ecf5a6bc433fbb7eeed
zlib/1.2.11: WARN: Can't find a 'zlib/1.2.11' package binary 'b1d267f77ddd5d10d06d2ecf5a6bc433fbb7eeed' for the configuration:
[settings]
arch=x86_64
build_type=Release
compiler=apple-clang
compiler.cppstd=gnu11
compiler.libcxx=libc++
compiler.version=14
os=Macos
[options]
fPIC=True
shared=False
ERROR: Missing prebuilt package for 'zlib/1.2.11'. You can try:
    - List all available packages using 'conan list "{ref}:*" -r=remote'
    - Explain missing binaries: replace 'conan install ...' with 'conan graph explain ...'
    - Try to build locally from sources using the '--build=zlib/1.2.11' argument
More Info at 'https://docs.conan.io/en/2/knowledge/faq.html#error-missing-prebuilt-package'

This means that the package recipe zlib/1.2.11 exists, but for some reason there is no precompiled package for your current settings or options. Maybe the package creator didn’t build and shared pre-built packages at all and only uploaded the package recipe, or they are only providing packages for some platforms or compilers. E.g. the package creator built packages from the recipe for apple-clang 11, but you are using apple-clang 14. Also you may want to check your package ID mode as it may have an influence on the packages available for it.

By default, Conan doesn’t build packages from sources. There are several possibilities to overcome this error:

You can try to build the package for your settings from sources, indicating some build policy as argument, like --build zlib* or --build missing. If the package recipe and the source code work for your settings you will have your binaries built locally and ready for use.
If building from sources fails, and you are using the conancenter remote, you can open an issue in the Conan Center Index repository

ERROR: Invalid setting

It might happen sometimes, when you specify a setting not present in the defaults that you receive a message like this:

$ conan install . -s compiler.version=4.19 ...
ERROR: Invalid setting '4.19' is not a valid 'settings.compiler.version' value.
Possible values are ['4.4', '4.5', '4.6', '4.7', '4.8', '4.9', '5.1', '5.2', '5.3', '5.4', '6.1', '6.2']

This doesn’t mean that such compiler version is not supported by Conan, it is just that it is not present in the actual defaults settings. You can find in your user home folder ~/.conan2/settings.yml a settings file that you can modify, edit, add any setting or any value, with any nesting if necessary. See settings.yml to learn how you can customize your settings to model your binaries at your will.

As long as your team or users have the same settings (settings.yml and settings_user.yml an be easily shared with the conan config install command), everything will work. The settings.yml file is just a mechanism so users agree on a common spelling for typical settings. Also, if you think that some settings would be useful for many other conan users, please submit it as an issue or a pull request, so it is included in future releases.

It is possible that some built-in helper or integrations, like CMake or CMakeToolchain will not understand the new added settings, don’t use them or even fail if you added some new unexpected value to existing settings. Such helpers as CMake are simple utilities to translate from conan settings to the respective build system syntax and command line arguments, so they can be extended or replaced with your own one that would handle your own private settings.

ERROR: AuthenticationException:

This error can happen, if there are no or false authentication credentials in the HTTP request from conan. To get more information try enabling the debug level for HTTP connections:

import http.client
http.client.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1

One source of error can be the .netrc file, which is honored by the requests library.

ERROR: Obtaining different revisions in Linux and Windows

Git will (by default) checkout files in Windows systems using CRLF line endings, effectively producing different files than in Linux that files will use LF line endings. As files are different, the Conan recipe revision will be different from the revisions computed in other platforms such as Linux, resulting in missing the respective binaries in the other revision.

Conan will not normalize or change in any way the source files, it is not its responsibility and there are risks of breaking things. The source control is the application changing the files, so that is a more correct place to handle this. It is necessary to instruct Git to do the checkout with the same line endings. This can be done several ways, for example, by adding a .gitattributes file to the project repository:

[auto]
  crlf = false

Other approach would be to change the .gitconfig to change it globally. Modern editors (even Notepad) in Windows can perfectly work with files with LF, it is no longer necessary to change the line endings.

Defining options for dependencies in conanfile.py recipes doesn’t work

Conan expands the dependency graph depth-first, this is important to be able to implement many of the very special C/C++ propagation logic (headers, static and shared libraries, applications, tool-requires, test-requires, conflicts, overrides, etc.).

This means that when a conanfile.py declares something like:

class MyPkg(ConanFile):
    name = "mypkg"
    version = "0.1"
    default_options = {"zlib/*:shared": True}
    # Or
    def requirements(self):
        self.requires("zlib/1.3", options={"shared": True})

it cannot be always honored, and the zlib dependency might end with different shared=False option value. This in-recipe options values definition for dependencies only works if:

There are no other packages depending on zlib in the graph
There are other packages depending on zlib in the graph, but mypkg/0.1 is the first require (the first branch in the dependency graph) that is required. That means that requires = "mypkg/0.1", "zlib/1.3" will work and will have zlib as shared, but requires = "zlib/1.3", "mypkg/0.1" will expand first zlib with its default, which is shared=False and when the mypkg/0.1 is computed it will be too late to change zlib to be shared=True.

In case there are some recipe that won’t work at all with some option of the dependency, the recommendation is to define a validate() method in the recipe to guarantee that it will raise an error if for some reason the upstream dependency doesn’t have the right options values.

Conan might be able to show some (not guaranteed to be exhaustive) of these issues in the output of the Conan commands, please read it carefully.

Options conflicts
    liba/0.1:myoption=1 (current value)
        libc/0.1->myoption=2
    It is recommended to define options values in profiles, not in recipes

In general, it is more recommended to define options values in profile files, not in recipes. Recipe defined options always have precedence over options defined in profiles.