Publishing a Crate to Crates.io

We've added crates from crates.io as dependencies of our project. We can choose to share our code for other people to use as well. Crates.io distributes the source code of your packages, so it is primarily used to distribute code that's open source.

Rust and Cargo have some features that can make your published package easier for people to find and use. We'll talk about some of those features, then cover how to publish a package.

Documentation Comments

In Chapter 3, we saw comments in Rust that start with //. Rust also has a second kind of comment: the documentation comment. While comments can be useful if someone is reading your code, you can generate HTML documentation that displays the contents of documentation comments for public API items meant for someone who's interested in knowing how to use your crate, as opposed to how your crate is implemented. Note that documentation is only generated for library crates, since binary crates don't have a public API that people need to know how to use.

Documentation comments use /// instead of // and support Markdown notation inside. They go just before the item they are documenting. Here's documentation comments for an add_one function:

Filename: src/lib.rs

/// Adds one to the number given.
///
/// # Examples
///
/// ```
/// let five = 5;
///
/// assert_eq!(6, add_one(five));
/// ```
pub fn add_one(x: i32) -> i32 {
    x + 1
}

Listing 14-1: A documentation comment for a function

cargo doc runs a tool distributed with Rust, rustdoc, to generate HTML documentation from these comments. To try this out locally, you can run cargo doc --open, which will build the documentation for your current crate (as well as all of your crate's dependencies) and open it in a web browser. Navigate to the add_one function and you'll see how the text in the documentation comments gets rendered.

Adding examples in code blocks in your documentation comments is a way to clearly demonstrate how to use your library. There's an additional bonus reason to do this: cargo test will run the code examples in your documentation as tests! Nothing is better than documentation with examples. Nothing is worse than examples that don't actually work because the code has changed since the documentation has been written. Try running cargo test with the documentation for the add_one function in Listing 14-1; you'll see a section in the test results like this:

   Doc-tests add-one

running 1 test
test add_one_0 ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

Try changing the function or the example to see that cargo test will catch that the example no longer works!

There's another style of doc comment, //!, to comment containing items (e.g. crates, modules or functions), instead of the items following it. These are typically used inside the crate root (lib.rs) or a module's root (mod.rs) to document the crate or the module as a whole, respectively. Here's the documentation within the libstd module that contains the entire standard library:

//! # The Rust Standard Library
//!
//! The Rust Standard Library provides the essential runtime
//! functionality for building portable Rust software.

Exporting a Convenient Public API with pub use

In Chapter 7, we covered how to organize our code into modules with the mod keyword, how to make items public with the pub keyword, and how to bring items into a scope with the use keyword. When publishing a crate for people unfamiliar with the implementation to use, it's worth taking time to consider if the structure of your crate that's useful for you as you're developing is what would be useful for people depending on your crate. If the structure isn't convenient to use from another library, you don't have to rearrange your internal organization: you can choose to re-export items to make a different public structure with pub use.

For example, say that we made a library named art consisting of a kinds module containing an enum named Color and a utils module containing a function named mix as shown in Listing 14-2:

Filename: src/lib.rs

//! # Art
//!
//! A library for modeling artistic concepts.

pub mod kinds {
    /// The primary colors according to the RYB color model.
    pub enum PrimaryColor {
        Red,
        Yellow,
        Blue,
    }

    /// The secondary colors according to the RYB color model.
    pub enum SecondaryColor {
        Orange,
        Green,
        Purple,
    }
}

pub mod utils {
    use kinds::*;

    /// Combines two primary colors in equal amounts to create
    /// a secondary color.
    pub fn mix(c1: PrimaryColor, c2: PrimaryColor) -> SecondaryColor {
        // ...snip...
#         SecondaryColor::Green
    }
}

Listing 14-2: An art library with items organized into kinds and utils modules

In order to use this library, another crate would have use statements as in Listing 14-3:

Filename: src/main.rs

extern crate art;

use art::kinds::PrimaryColor;
use art::utils::mix;

fn main() {
    let red = PrimaryColor::Red;
    let yellow = PrimaryColor::Yellow;
    mix(red, yellow);
}

Listing 14-3: A program using the art crate's items with its internal structure exported

Users of this crate shouldn't need to know that PrimaryColor and SecondaryColor are in the kinds module, and mix is in the utils module; that structure might be useful for internal organization but doesn't have much meaning from the outside looking in.

To change this, we can add the following pub use statements to the code from Listing 14-2 to re-export the types at the top level, as shown in Listing 14-4:

Filename: src/lib.rs

//! # Art
//!
//! A library for modeling artistic concepts.

pub use kinds::PrimaryColor;
pub use kinds::SecondaryColor;
pub use utils::mix;

pub mod kinds {
    // ...snip...

Listing 14-4: Adding pub use statements to re-export items

Re-exports are listed and linked on the front page of the crate's API documentation. Users of the art crate can still see and choose to use the internal structure as in Listing 14-3, or they can use the more convenient structure from Listing 14-4, as shown in Listing 14-5:

Filename: src/main.rs

extern crate art;

use art::PrimaryColor;
use art::mix;

fn main() {
    // ...snip...
}

Listing 14-5: Using the re-exported items from the art crate

Creating a useful public API structure is more of an art than a science. Choosing pub use gives you flexibility in how you expose your crate's internal structure to users. Take a look at some of the code of crates you've installed to see if their internal structure differs from their public API.

Before Your First Publish

Before being able to publish any crates, you'll need to create an account on crates.io and get an API token. To do so, visit the home page and log in via a GitHub account. A GitHub account is a requirement for now, but the site might support other ways of creating an account in the future. Once you're logged in, visit your Account Settings page and run the cargo login command with the API key as the page specifies, which will look something like this:

$ cargo login abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345

This command will inform Cargo of your API token and store it locally in ~/.cargo/config. Note that this token is a secret and should not be shared with anyone else. If it gets shared with anyone for any reason, you should regenerate it immediately.

Before Publishing a New Crate

First, your crate will need a unique name. While you're working on a crate locally, you may name a crate whatever you'd like, but crate names on crates.io are allocated on a first-come-first- serve basis. Once a crate name is taken, it cannot be used for another crate, so check on the site that the name you'd like is available.

If you try to publish a crate as generated by cargo new, you'll get a warning and then an error:

$ cargo publish
    Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index`
warning: manifest has no description, license, license-file, documentation,
homepage or repository.
...snip...
error: api errors: missing or empty metadata fields: description, license.
Please see http://doc.crates.io/manifest.html#package-metadata for how to
upload metadata

We can include more information about our package in Cargo.toml. Some of these fields are optional, but a description and a license are required in order to publish so that people will know what your crate does and under what terms they may use it.

The description appears with your crate in search results and on your crate's page. Descriptions are usually a sentence or two. The license field takes a license identifier value, and the possible values have been specified by the Linux Foundation's Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). If you would like to use a license that doesn't appear there, instead of the license key, you can use license-file to specify the name of a file in your project that contains the text of the license you want to use.

Guidance on which license is right for your project is out of scope for this book. Many people in the Rust community choose to license their projects in the same way as Rust itself, with a dual license of MIT/Apache-2.0, which demonstrates that you can specify multiple license identifiers separated by a slash. So the Cargo.toml for a project that is ready to publish might look like this:

[package]
name = "guessing_game"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Your Name <[email protected]>"]
description = "A fun game where you guess what number the computer has chosen."
license = "MIT/Apache-2.0"

[dependencies]

Be sure to check out the documentation on crates.io that describes other metadata you can specify to ensure your crate can be discovered and used more easily!

Publishing to Crates.io

Now that we've created an account, saved our API token, chosen a name for our crate, and specified the required metadata, we're ready to publish! Publishing a crate is when a specific version is uploaded to be hosted on crates.io.

Take care when publishing a crate, because a publish is permanent. The version can never be overwritten, and the code cannot be deleted. However, there is no limit to the number of versions which can be published.

Let's run the cargo publish command, which should succeed this time since we've now specified the required metadata:

$ cargo publish
 Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index`
Packaging guessing_game v0.1.0 (file:///projects/guessing_game)
Verifying guessing_game v0.1.0 (file:///projects/guessing_game)
Compiling guessing_game v0.1.0
(file:///projects/guessing_game/target/package/guessing_game-0.1.0)
 Finished debug [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.19 secs
Uploading guessing_game v0.1.0 (file:///projects/guessing_game)

Congratulations! You've now shared your code with the Rust community, and anyone can easily add your crate as a dependency to their project.

Publishing a New Version of an Existing Crate

When you've made changes to your crate and are ready to release a new version, change the version value specified in your Cargo.toml. Use the Semantic Versioning rules to decide what an appropriate next version number is based on the kinds of changes you've made. Then run cargo publish to upload the new version.

Removing Versions from Crates.io with cargo yank

Occasions may arise where you publish a version of a crate that actually ends up being broken for one reason or another, such as a syntax error or forgetting to include a file. For situations such as this, Cargo supports yanking a version of a crate.

Marking a version of a crate as yanked means that no projects will be able to start depending on that version, but all existing projects that depend on that version will continue to be allowed to download and depend on that version. One of the major goals of crates.io is to act as a permanent archive of code so that builds of all projects will continue to work, and allowing deletion of a version would go against this goal. Essentially, a yank means that all projects with a Cargo.lock will not break, while any future Cargo.lock files generated will not use the yanked version.

A yank does not delete any code. The yank feature is not intended for deleting accidentally uploaded secrets, for example. If that happens, you must reset those secrets immediately.

To yank a version of a crate, run cargo yank and specify which version you want to yank:

$ cargo yank --vers 1.0.1

You can also undo a yank, and allow projects to start depending on a version again, by adding --undo to the command:

$ cargo yank --vers 1.0.1 --undo

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