episode-002

Where we use cargo to setup a Rust project

Setup

The following needs to be prepared

• Terminal with access to cargo

Script

We can use rustc to compile Rust programs, but even for small projects this gets unwieldly. When we installed Rust another tool became available: cargo.

cargo is a jack of all trades for Rust, but in this episode we focus on building a Rust project.

By executing the command

cargo new hello --bin

a directory hello is created with the following structure

hello
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── main.rs

With a quick glance into main.rs we discover the familiar "Hello, World!" program. When we enter the just created directory hello and execute

cargo build

the project is build in debug-mode. We will talk about Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock in an other episode. For now we look into the target directory.

target
└── debug
    ├── build
    ├── deps
    ├── examples
    ├── hello
    ├── hello.dSYM
    │   └── Contents
    │       ├── Info.plist
    │       └── Resources
    │           └── DWARF
    │               └── hello
    └── native

For now the most important part is the target/debug/hello executable. We could run it by calling it directly, but instead the cargo command can be used as well.

By issuing

cargo run

target/debug/hello is executed.

And there you have it, we used cargo to create and build a Rust project.