Conan MCP Server is an integration server between the Conan package manager and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), used to let AI tools or clients invoke Conan's capabilities in a standardized way. Its target scenarios are dependency management, license compliance checking, and security vulnerability scanning in C/C++ project development.
Purpose
The server encapsulates common operations of the Conan package manager as MCP tools, making it convenient to complete tasks such as project creation, dependency querying, dependency installation, license collection, and vulnerability scanning through natural language in AI development environments that support MCP.
Main Capabilities
The server provides the following tools:
- get_conan_profile: Get the Conan profile configuration. A profile name can be specified; otherwise, the default profile is used.
- list_conan_profiles: List the available Conan profiles.
- create_conan_project: Create a new Conan project. You can specify the project template, name, version, requires, tool_requires, work_dir, and whether to force overwrite (force). Template types cover library projects (cmake_lib, header_lib, meson_lib, msbuild_lib, bazel_lib, autotools_lib) and executable projects (cmake_exe, meson_exe, msbuild_exe, bazel_exe, autotools_exe).
- list_conan_packages: List recipes and packages in the local cache or configured remotes, supporting retrieval by name, version, user, channel, recipe revision, package ID, settings filter, options filter, remote name, and whether to include the local cache, among other parameters.
- install_conan_packages: Install all dependencies of a Conan recipe and generate the complete dependency graph. The recipe path (relative to work_dir) and work directory must be specified. You can optionally specify the remote, whether to use only the cache, host settings overrides, host options overrides, and whether to build missing binary dependencies from source.
- get_conan_licenses: Collect license information for Conan package dependencies, extracted from the dependency graph via conan graph info. Only packages in the host context are analyzed; packages in the build context (build-time tools) are not included in the final product analysis.
- scan_conan_dependencies: Scan Conan packages and dependencies for security vulnerabilities. You can specify a recipe path or a specific package reference, and the two are mutually exclusive.
Usage
Conan must already be installed before use. The server can be added to the mcp.json configuration. By default, it uses the conan command in the system PATH or in the virtual environment where the MCP server is located; if you need to specify a particular Conan installation or version, you can set the environment variable CONAN_MCP_CONAN_PATH in the MCP configuration. If this variable is not set, the server will use conan from PATH or the virtual environment.
The configuration notes mention: uvx is provided by uv. If uv is not installed, you can install it with pip install conan-mcp and then use conan-mcp directly as the command.
During local development, you can use an absolute path in the MCP configuration; you can also use MCP Inspector to test whether the server works properly. Detailed instructions for running Conan MCP Server tests can be found in test/README.md.
Applicable Scenarios
It is suitable for the development and build processes of C/C++ projects, especially scenarios that require quickly creating Conan projects, querying and installing dependencies, checking whether dependency licenses meet commercial use requirements, or scanning dependencies for serious security vulnerabilities.
Limitations
The materials do not provide information about charging, pricing, platform support scope, performance, or specific effects; related content is not yet provided.
