Installing and configuring Rust is a breeze with rustup which is an installer for Rust. You can download it by visiting:
And following the onscreen instructions. You can confirm that the installation has worked by running:
rustc --version
The rustup installation also comes with another command line tool called cargo which is the Rust packager manager – akin to npm for Node. Rust packages are called crates and there is an online repository of crates visible here:
To start a new Rust project, we’ll run the following command:
cargo new --bin helloworld
This will create a new folder called helloworld in your current working directory. The --bin flag creates a new binary crate which compiles into an executable to run. The alternative is a library crate --lib that are meant to be used in other projects.
Inside the helloworld directory, you’ll find a file called Cargo.toml which contains metadata and dependencies in our application (similar to package.json from npm) as well as the src directory where our source code lives. Inside the src folder you’ll find a main.rs file with your typical “Hello, world” program ready to run. To run the program we can run:
cargo build
This command generates some new files for us. It first creates a Cargo.lock which keeps track of the exact versions of the dependencies we used if we had any and a target folder. In target there’s another folder called debug that contains the executable. We can now run our program:
<!-- Use forward slashes on UNIX systems. -->
.\target\debug\helloworld
The command above creates an unoptimized debug version of our code. If we want to prepare it for production, we can add the --release flag. Since we’ll be frequently building and running our code in development, cargo provide a two-in-one command via:
cargo run
Most importantly, your rustup installation comes with all the documentation for Rust as well as an entire book on learning Rust locally on your computer. You can access the documentation, by running:
rustup doc