Installing Cargo

Cargo is Rust’s package manager. You can use it to download your project’s dependencies and to compile your project. You can start a new project using Cargo by typing:

$ cargo new my_project

This will create a new directory with manifest (Cargo.toml), a source code directory (src) and a “Hello, World!” program in src/main.rs.

$ cd my_project/
$ tree .
.
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── main.rs

1 directory, 2 files

The manifest is written in TOML language and looks like this:

[package]
name = "my_project"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Your Name <you@example.com>"]
edition = "2018"

[dependencies]

To run your new project, type:

$ cargo run
   Compiling my_project v0.1.0 (file:///home/fedora/rust/my_project)
     Running `target/debug/my_project`
Hello, world!

Using Rust libraries (“crates”)

Rust calls its compilation unit (either library or executable) a crate. Your project is such a crate and it can also depend on other crates specified in Cargo.toml. The default repository to look for dependencies is crates.io but you can also specify dependencies on a git repository. More information about all the different ways of specifying dependencies is available in the cargo book.

While many Rust crates are also packaged for Fedora Linux (as rust-$crate, with rust-$crate-*-devel packages available from the package repositories), the crates packaged this way are primarily intended to be used for building RPM packages for Rust applications. Using these crates as a replacement for crates.io is not a supported use case. In some cases they also diverge from crates as published on crates.io because of downstream-specific patches (both concerning crate dependencies and behaviour), so they might not even be a suitable development target.

Note: Both crates.io and Fedora only distribute Rust crates as source code. Rust does not yet provide a stable ABI, so it is not possible to distribute pre-compiled Rust crates / libraries in a binary format.

Authors: Fabio Valentini, Jarek Prokop, Josh Stone, Nick Dirschel, msehnout