Rust

• Installing Rust
  • Fedora
  • Debian and Ubuntu
• Local docs with rustup

Installing Rust

The officially recommended way of installing Rust is using a curlpipe to install rustup..

I really dislike curlpipes, and installing software outside of package managers. And cargo is a really good package manager, but unfortunately there's a lack of good Rust packages in Linux bistro repos. The official Rust Forge documentation (supplementary docs for Rust, a lot of interesting stuff there around how they manage the project, infrastructure, build channels, design decisions and such)doesn't really mention any good packages in Linux bistros or particularly recommend using the ones that do exist..

Fedora

Fedora provides up-to-date Rust packages in their standard repos.

$ sudo dnf install rust cargo
$ cargo --version
cargo 1.75.0

Same version as in the rust:latest Docker image.

$ docker run --rm -it rust:latest cargo --version
cargo 1.75.0(1d8b05cdd 2023-11-20)

They also have an up-to-date rustup package:

$ sudo dnf install rustup
$ rustup-init

If you had already installed the cargo and rust packages with dnf, you should remove them before running rustup-init to avoid confusing conflicts.

$ rustup --version
rustup 1.26.0
$ cargo --version
cargo 1.75.0 (1d8b05cdd 2023-11-20)

The instructions for installing Rust and cargo are in the Rust section in the Fedora Developer portal, where they also provide a pretty good and concise docs on how to structure a cargo project.

Debian and Ubuntu

The Debian repos seem to have somewhat up to date packages (and they have a RustPackaging team).

And Ubuntu isn't too far behind, I will try that out soon and update:

$ apt-cache policy rust-all
  rust-all:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: 1.70.0+dfsg0ubuntu1~bpo2-0ubuntu0.22.04.2

There is also a rustlang PPA on Launchpad with stable and nightly builds that I've seen mentioned.

Local docs with rustup

To load the local copy of the Rust docs:

$ rustup doc

You can pass a --toolchain argument if you want docs for a specific toolchain (which must be installed).

The docs are stored in $RUSTUP_HOME/toolchains/$toolchain/share/doc/rust/html.

$ rustup doc --path

Will print the path to where the docs are stored.