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Overview

Conary is a system software provisioning and management tool that brings concepts from distributed source code control systems such as Git and Mercurial to system management. Conary provides differential update, rollback, configuration management, staging/promotion, entitlement, replication, dependency management, introspection, attribution/lineage, repeatable build, and layered platform/system definition. Unlike most package-based software management tools that depend on archive files as their primary mechanism of distribution, Conary provides networked repositories containing structured version hierarchies of all the files and organized sets of files in software products.

Conary has three main components: software repository, system management, and software build. The system management component manages the state of an individual system (based on the contents of a Conary repository), the build component automates building software and collections of software into a Conary repository, and the Conary repository is a web application that stores versions of software and collections of software.

Conary models the intended state of a system, such that it can recreate the same state systematically on other machines, enabling precise staging (“dev/test/prod”) of changes through a deployment process, and easing provisioning of large sets of similar or identical systems. A model can be maintained on a target system or packaged into a Conary repository. Conary also intelligently preserves intentional local changes on installed systems, such that an update will not blindly obliterate local changes such as changes to configuration files.

Conary is also the core technology of a family of tools that further automate the software build and management process.