Cargo B(inary)Install

A helper for distribution and installation of CI built rust binaries in a pseudo-distributed and maybe-one-day secure manner. This is part experiment, part solving a personal problem, and part hope that we can solve / never re-visit this. I hope you find it helpful and, good luck!

To get started using cargo-binstall, first install the binary (either via cargo install cargo-binstall or by downloading a pre-compiled release. Once you have installed this you can of course cargo binstall cargo-binstall to install further versions...

Supported packages can be installed using cargo binstall NAME where NAME is the crate.io package name. Package versions and targets may be specified using the --version and --target arguments respectively, and install directory with --install-dir (this defaults to $HOME/.cargo/bin, with fall-backs to $HOME/.bin if unavailable). For additional options please see cargo binstall --help.

To support binstall maintainers must add configuration values to Cargo.toml to allow the tool to locate the appropriate CI-produced binary package for a given version and target. See Supporting Binary Installation for instructions on how to support binstall in your projects.

Status

Features

• Manifest discovery
  • Fetch crate/manifest via crates.io
  • Fetch crate/manifest via git
  • Use local crate/manifest (--manifest-path)
• Package formats
  • Tgz
  • Tar
  • Bin
• Extraction / Transformation
  • Extract from subdirectory in archive (ie. support archives with platform or target subdirectories)
  • Extract specific files from archive (ie. support single archive with multiple platform binaries)
• Security
  • Package signing
  • Package verification

Supporting Binary Installation

binstall works with existing CI-built binary outputs, with configuration via [package.metadata.binstall] keys in the relevant crate manifest. When configuring binstall you can test against a local manifest with --manifest-path=PATH argument to use the crate and manifest at the provided PATH, skipping crate discovery and download.

By default binstall is setup to work with github releases, and expects to find:

• an archive named { name }-{ target }-v{ version }.tgz
  • so that this does not overwrite different targets or versions when manually downloaded
• located at { repo }/releases/download/v{ version }/
  • compatible with github tags / releases
• containing a folder named { name }-{ target }-v{ version }
  • so that prior binary files are not overwritten when manually executing tar -xvf ...
• containing binary files in the form { bin }{ format } (where bin is the cargo binary name and format is .exe on windows and empty on other platforms)

These defaults can be overridden using the following configuration keys:

• pkg-url specifies the binary package URL for a given target/version, templated (defaults to: { repo }/releases/download/v{ version }/{ name }-{ target }-v{ version }.{ format })
• bin-path specifies the binary path within the package, templated (defaults to: { name }-{ target }-v{ version }/{ bin } with a .exe suffix on windows)
• pkg-fmt overrides the package format for download/extraction (defaults to: tgz)

Template variables use the format { VAR } where VAR is the name of the variable, with the following variables available:

• name is the name of the crate / package
• version is the crate version (per --version and the crate manifest)
• repo is the repository linked in Cargo.toml
• bin is the name of a specific binary, inferred from the crate configuration
• target is the rust target name (defaults to your architecture, but can be overridden using the --target command line option if required().

Operation

• Lookup a viable crate version (currently via crates.io, in future via git tags too)
• Download crate snapshot (currently via crates.io)
• Parse configuration metadata and binary information from the downloaded snapshot
• Download and extract binary package using configured URL (pkg-url, pkg-fmt)
• Install versioned binary files to the relevant install dir
• Generate symlinks to versioned binaries

Examples

For example, the default configuration (if specified in Cargo.toml) would be:

[package.metadata.binstall]
pkg-url = "{ repo }/releases/download/v{ version }/{ name }-{ target }-v{ version }.{ format }"
bin-dir = "{ name }-{ target }-v{ version }/{ bin }{ format }"
pkg-fmt = "tgz"

For a crate called radio-sx128x ( at version v0.14.1-alpha.5 on x86_64 linux), this would be interpolated to:

• A download URL of https://github.com/rust-iot/rust-radio-sx128x/releases/download/v0.14.1-alpha.5/rust-radio-sx128x-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-v0.14.1-alpha.5.tgz
• Containing a single binary file rust-radio-sx128x-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-v0.14.1-alpha.5/rust-radio-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
• Installed to$HOME/.cargo/bin/rust-radio-sx128x-v0.14.1-alpha.5
• With a symlink from $HOME/.cargo/bin/rust-radio-sx128x

If the package name does not match the crate name

As is common with libraries / utilities (and the radio-sx128x example), this can be overridden by specifying:

[package.metadata.binstall]
pkg-url = "{ repo }/releases/download/v{ version }/sx128x-util-{ target }-v{ version }.{ format }"

Which provides a download URL of: https://github.com/rust-iot/rust-radio-sx128x/releases/download/v0.14.1-alpha.5/sx128x-util-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-v0.14.1-alpha.5.tgz

If the package structure differs from the default

While it's nice to have the default format discussed above, often it's not the case...

Were the package to contain binaries in the form name-target[.exe], this could be specified as:

[package.metadata.binstall]
bin-dir = "{ bin }-{ target }{ format }"

Which provides a binary path of: sx128x-util-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu[.exe] (binary names are inferred from the crate, so long as cargo builds them this should just work).

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If you have ideas / contributions or anything is not working the way you expect (in which case, please include an output with --log-level debug) and feel free to open an issue or PR.