The cargo install command allows you to install and use binary crates
locally. This isn’t intended to replace system packages; it’s meant to be a
convenient way for Rust developers to install tools that others have shared on
crates.io. Note that you can only install
packages that have binary targets. A binary target is the runnable program
that is created if the crate has a src/main.rs file or another file specified
as a binary, as opposed to a library target that isn’t runnable on its own but
is suitable for including within other programs. Usually, crates have
information in the README file about whether a crate is a library, has a
binary target, or both.
All binaries installed with cargo install are stored in the installation
root’s bin folder. If you installed Rust using rustup.rs and don’t have any
custom configurations, this directory will be $HOME/.cargo/bin. Ensure that
directory is in your $PATH to be able to run programs you’ve installed with
cargo install.
For example, in Chapter 12 we mentioned that there’s a Rust implementation of
the grep tool called ripgrep for searching files. If we want to install
ripgrep, we can run the following:
$ cargo install ripgrep
Updating crates.io index
Downloaded ripgrep v11.0.2
Downloaded 1 crate (243.3 KB) in 0.88s
Installing ripgrep v11.0.2
--snip--
Compiling ripgrep v11.0.2
Finished release [optimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 3m 10s
Installing ~/.cargo/bin/rg
Installed package `ripgrep v11.0.2` (executable `rg`)
The second-to-last line of the output shows the location and the name of the
installed binary, which in the case of ripgrep is rg. As long as the
installation directory is in your $PATH, as mentioned previously, you can
then run rg --help and start using a faster, rustier tool for searching files!