A Better Cargo Install Workflow

Thanks to great tooling in the ecosystem, people are constantly building really great CLI tools with Rust. And with cargo it is really easy to install and distribute them, without the author needing to go through the hassle of integrating it into yet another package manager. Everything is a cargo install away.

However, there are a few downsides:

1. Do I really have to build them from source every single time? (for some tools, while it is amazing cargo makes it easy, it still takes a long time)
2. How do I keep track of all of the CLIs I have installed? And keep them up-to-date?

I've managed to address both with a two cargo subcommands.

cargo binstall: Fast installs from pre-built binaries

cargo-binstall is in most cases a drop-in replacement for cargo install. It has a multi-tiered strategy to find binaries already compiled for your target architecture, falling back to building from source if it can't find one.

9 times out of 10, this means installing takes mere seconds (instead of minutes).

To get started, there are several methods of installation, and if you use the shell script, it will already use cargo-binstall to install cargo-binstall. But you can also do a plain cargo install (and this will hopefully be the last time you have to do this).

curl -L --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.sh | bash

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope Process; iex (iwr "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.ps1").Content

cargo install cargo-binstall

Once this is done, you can now use cargo binstall and get faster installs! Try it out. (If you need an idea, cargo-nextest is one I recommend to everyone).

cargo install-update -a to update all of your installed binaries

Now that you can install all of the binaries you want quickly, you may want to keep them up-to-date and get all of their new features as quickly as possible as well.

Thanks to the cargo-update subcommand, this is really easy. First, install the command:

cargo binstall cargo-update

Then, you can just run:

cargo install-update -a

This will go through and check all of your cargo installed binaries and see if there are newer versions. Since you have cargo-binstall installed, it will default to using this, which makes the upgrades quick and painless, only needing to cargo install from source if binstall can't install it for you.

Polling registry 'https://index.crates.io/'.................

Package          Installed  Latest    Needs update
cargo-binstall   v1.10.10   v1.10.11  Yes
wasmtime-cli     v26.0.0    v26.0.1   Yes
cargo-component  v0.18.0    v0.18.0   No
cargo-expand     v1.0.95    v1.0.95   No
cargo-insta      v1.41.1    v1.41.1   No
cargo-machete    v0.7.0     v0.7.0    No
cargo-msrv       v0.16.2    v0.16.2   No
cargo-nextest    v0.9.82    v0.9.82   No
cargo-outdated   v0.15.0    v0.15.0   No
cargo-update     v16.0.0    v16.0.0   No
flamegraph       v0.6.5     v0.6.5    No
maturin          v1.7.4     v1.7.4    No
sqlx-cli         v0.8.2     v0.8.2    No
wac-cli          v0.6.1     v0.6.1    No
wasm-pack        v0.13.1    v0.13.1   No
wasm-tools       v1.219.1   v1.219.1  No
wit-deps-cli     v0.4.0     v0.4.0    No

Updating cargo-binstall
 INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'cargo-binstall'
 INFO resolve: Verified signature for package 'cargo-binstall': gh=cargo-bins/cargo-binstall git=02e9225fbd07c965123a530da9d6f5c494e1e977 ts=2024-11-05T21:00:47.717Z run=11692328231
 WARN The package cargo-binstall v1.10.11 (aarch64-apple-darwin) has been downloaded from github.com
 INFO This will install the following binaries:
 INFO   - cargo-binstall => /Users/benjamin.brandt/.cargo/bin/cargo-binstall
 INFO Installing binaries...
 INFO Done in 3.699568708s

Updating wasmtime-cli
 INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'wasmtime-cli'
 WARN The package wasmtime-cli v26.0.1 (aarch64-apple-darwin) has been downloaded from github.com
 INFO This will install the following binaries:
 INFO   - wasmtime => /Users/benjamin.brandt/.cargo/bin/wasmtime
 INFO Installing binaries...
 INFO Done in 3.733854125s


Updated 2 packages.
Overall updated 2 packages: cargo-binstall, wasmtime-cli.

Also notice that it will even keep cargo-binstall and cargo-update up-to-date for you!

And that is it. With this setup, I am no longer worried when using cargo to install tools for me that I'll forget about them and they'll be out of date. The wealth of tools available on crates.io are as easy to use as something from homebrew, and they install in a matter of seconds.

Hopefully this helps enable you to do the same, and enjoy all of the great CLI tooling available to you.