rust/src/doc/trpl/hello-cargo.md

% Hello, Cargo!

Cargo is a tool that Rustaceans use to help manage their Rust projects. Cargo is currently in a pre-1.0 state, and so it is still a work in progress. However, it is already good enough to use for many Rust projects, and so it is assumed that Rust projects will use Cargo from the beginning.

Cargo manages three things: building your code, downloading the dependencies your code needs, and building those dependencies. At first, your program doesn’t have any dependencies, so we’ll only be using the first part of its functionality. Eventually, we’ll add more. Since we started off by using Cargo, it'll be easy to add later.

If you installed Rust via the official installers you will also have Cargo. If you installed Rust some other way, you may want to check the Cargo README for specific instructions about installing it.

Converting to Cargo

Let’s convert Hello World to Cargo.

To Cargo-ify our project, we need to do two things: Make a Cargo.toml configuration file, and put our source file in the right place. Let's do that part first:

$ mkdir src
$ mv main.rs src/main.rs

Cargo expects your source files to live inside a src directory. That leaves the top level for other things, like READMEs, license information, and anything not related to your code. Cargo helps us keep our projects nice and tidy. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Next, our configuration file:

$ editor Cargo.toml

Make sure to get this name right: you need the capital C!

Put this inside:

[package]

name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"
authors = [ "Your name <you@example.com>" ]

This file is in the TOML format. Let’s let it explain itself to you:

TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.

TOML is very similar to INI, but with some extra goodies.

Once you have this file in place, we should be ready to build! Try this:

$ cargo build
   Compiling hello_world v0.0.1 (file:///home/yourname/projects/hello_world)
$ ./target/debug/hello_world
Hello, world!

Bam! We build our project with cargo build, and run it with ./target/debug/hello_world. We can do both in one step with cargo run:

$ cargo run
     Running `target/debug/hello_world`
Hello, world!

Notice that we didn’t re-build the project this time. Cargo figured out that we hadn’t changed the source file, and so it just ran the binary. If we had made a modification, we would have seen it do both:

$ cargo run
   Compiling hello_world v0.0.1 (file:///home/yourname/projects/hello_world)
     Running `target/debug/hello_world`
Hello, world!

This hasn’t bought us a whole lot over our simple use of rustc, but think about the future: when our project gets more complex, we would need to do more things to get all of the parts to properly compile. With Cargo, as our project grows, we can just cargo build, and it’ll work the right way.

When your project is finally ready for release, you can use cargo build --release to compile your project with optimizations.

You'll also notice that Cargo has created a new file: Cargo.lock.

[root]
name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"

This file is used by Cargo to keep track of dependencies in your application. Right now, we don’t have any, so it’s a bit sparse. You won't ever need to touch this file yourself, just let Cargo handle it.

That’s it! We’ve successfully built hello_world with Cargo. Even though our program is simple, it’s using much of the real tooling that you’ll use for the rest of your Rust career. You can expect to do this to get started with virtually all Rust projects:

$ git clone someurl.com/foo
$ cd foo
$ cargo build

A New Project

You don’t have to go through this whole process every time you want to start a new project! Cargo has the ability to make a bare-bones project directory in which you can start developing right away.

To start a new project with Cargo, use cargo new:

$ cargo new hello_world --bin

We’re passing --bin because we're making a binary program: if we were making a library, we'd leave it off.

Let's check out what Cargo has generated for us:

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

1 directory, 2 files

If you don't have the tree command, you can probably get it from your distribution’s package manager. It’s not necessary, but it’s certainly useful.

This is all we need to get started. First, let’s check out Cargo.toml:

[package]

name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"
authors = ["Your Name <you@example.com>"]

Cargo has populated this file with reasonable defaults based off the arguments you gave it and your git global configuration. You may notice that Cargo has also initialized the hello_world directory as a git repository.

Here’s what’s in src/main.rs:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Cargo has generated a "Hello World!" for us, and you’re ready to start coding! Cargo has its own guide which covers Cargo’s features in much more depth.

Now that you’ve got the tools down, let’s actually learn more about the Rust language itself. These are the basics that will serve you well through the rest of your time with Rust.

You have two options: Dive into a project with ‘Learn Rust’, or start from the bottom and work your way up with ‘Syntax and Semantics’. More experienced systems programmers will probably prefer ‘Learn Rust’, while those from dynamic backgrounds may enjoy either. Different people learn differently! Choose whatever’s right for you.