Rust Learning Series

Rust Installation

Rust Language

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Installation on Unix-like OS

For installing on macOS, Linux, or another Unix-like OS:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

The above command downloads a script and starts the installation of the rustup tool which installs the latest stable version of Rust.

Rust, by default, installed in the following location:

$HOME/.cargo

Following are the directories inside $HOME/.cargo.

$HOME/.cargo
|- bin/
|- env/
|- registry/

rustup

Rust and its associated tools are installed and managed by a command line tool called rustup.

Find rustup Version

rustup --version

Update rustup

rustup update

Uninstall Rust and rustup

rustup self uninstall

Troubleshooting

To check whether we have Rust installed correctly, run the below rustup command in the terminal:

rustup --version

Toolchain

In the Rust development environment, all tools are installed to the $HOME/.cargo/bin directory and this is where you will find the Rust toolchain, including rustc, cargo, and rustup.

Keeping Rust up to date

The Rust release process adopts release train model in which there are three different release channels: nightly, beta, and stable. Nightly gets promoted to beta and beta gets promoted to stable: nightly → beta → stable.

rustup is configured to use the stable channel by default and is released every six weeks. When a new version of Rust is released, we can type rustup update to update to it:

$ rustup update
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable'
info: downloading component 'rustc'
info: downloading component 'rust-std'
info: downloading component 'rust-docs'
info: downloading component 'cargo'
info: installing component 'rustc'
info: installing component 'rust-std'
info: installing component 'rust-docs'
info: installing component 'cargo'
info: checking for self-updates
info: downloading self-updates
  stable updated: rustc 1.7.0 (a5d1e7a59 2016-02-29)

Updating rustup alone (Self update)

Running rustup update also checks for updates to rustup and automatically installs the latest version. To manually check for updates and install the latest version of rustup without updating installed toolchains, type rustup self update.

$ rustup self update
info: checking for self-updates
info: downloading self-updates

Updating Rust Toolchain alone (without updating rustup)

Note that rustup will automatically update itself at the end of any toolchain installation as well. You can prevent this automatic behaviour by passing the --no-self-update argument when running rustup update or rustup toolchain install.

Environment variables

RUSTUP_HOME (default: ~/.rustup or %USERPROFILE%/.rustup)

RUSTUP_TOOLCHAIN (default: none)

RUSTUP_DIST_SERVER (default: https://static.rust-lang.org)

RUSTUP_UPDATE_ROOT (default https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup)

RUSTUP_IO_THREADS unstable (defaults to reported CPU count)

RUSTUP_TRACE_DIR unstable (default: no tracing)

RUSTUP_UNPACK_RAM unstable (default 400M, min 100M)

RUSTUP_NO_BACKTRACE

RUST_BACKTRACE

Cargo

Cargo is the Rust build tool and package manager. It comes installed with Rust if we use the official installation steps.

Cargo does lots of things:

• Build our project with cargo build — takes care of downloading the libraries our code depends on.
• Run our project with cargo run
• Test our project with cargo test
• Build documentation of our project with cargo doc
• Publish a library to crates.io with cargo publish

Other Tools

Rustfmt

It’s a formatting tool and can be installed via rustup as follows rustup component add rustfmt

Clippy

It’s a lint tool which can be installed via rustup as follows rustup component add clippy