[bug] .conanrc file is searched for wrt to the cwd instead of the recipe dir

[rconde01]

Environment details

• Operating System+version: Windows 11
• Compiler+version: Visual Studio 2022
• Conan version: 2.0.4
• Python version: 3.11.0

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a project with a consumer file (e.g. conanfile.txt)
2. Create a .conanrc file containing an alternate conan_home
3. Navigate to an unrelated directory
4. do a conan install on the recipe
5. The .conanrc file will not be found

Looking at the source I found it starts the search from the cwd rather than the recipe directory.

@prince-chrismc

Logs

No response

[memsharded]

I am having a look at this, not very sure this is a bug, or it is a design/architecture trade-off.

.conanrc contains the location of the current CONAN_HOME, which is the very first thing that the ConanAPI does, and that ConanAPI is the very first thing that is instantiated, and passed to the CLI commands.

So at the moment a command that receives a conanfile.py as a path could use that path, the ConanAPI has been instantiated and configured with the values of configuration defined in the CONAN_HOME defined in the .conanrc.

The other side is that there are many commands that doesn't receive a conanfile as an argument, like conan list, conan remove, conan upload, etc, etc, and all of those should also work with the correct CONAN_HOME of the current project.

So it seems that using the cwd as the origin for locating the .conanrc is intended and by design, and trying to change it for those commands will be very challenging and probably make the UX inconsistent:

conan install path/to/my/conanfile.py  #install packages in custom home
conan list .... # no packages found, using another home!!!

[rconde01]

I see your point. Maybe .conanrc wasn't really thought through then. I could see a --conan-home switch or --conan-rc-file, or both. Otherwise it's back to environment variables.

[memsharded]

I think it was thought back then, it was added some time ago july 2022, and I'd say this was discussed back then, and seem reasonable compromise. Exactly the use case for this file is for users to not have to recall about extra command line arguments, or even other cases where the command line was not being used, like integrations, IDEs, or similar stuff. So as long as the cwd is defined to be a given folder, that will automatically change the CONAN_HOME, with its own configuration and cache, and just changing cwd to a different folder to a different project will automatically use it, without the user needed to worry about passing CLI args.

[prince-chrismc]

When this feature gets documented it's worth capturing this intended case so it's clear how it should be used.

"When I am in this project folder, use this as the CONAN_HOME`" and not a "global shared user configuration for where home should be"

The explanation makes sense so it;s consistent for all commands

[memsharded]

Moved this to the docs repo, agree this needs to be documented correctly, but the behavior should be the current one, not a bug.