Other Rust Installation Methods

• Which installer should you use?
• Other ways to install rustup
• Standalone installers
• Source code

Which installer should you use?

Rust runs on many platforms, and there are many ways to install Rust. If you want to install Rust in the most straightforward, recommended way, then follow the instructions on the main installation page.

That page describes installation via rustup, a tool that manages multiple Rust toolchains in a consistent way across all platforms Rust supports. Why might one not want to install using those instructions?

• Offline installation. rustup downloads components from the internet on demand. If you need to install Rust without access to the internet, rustup is not suitable.
• Preference for the system package manager. On Linux in particular, but also on macOS with Homebrew, MacPorts or pkgsrc, and Windows with Chocolatey or Scoop, developers sometimes prefer to install Rust with their platform’s package manager.
• Preference against curl | sh. On Unix, we usually install rustup by running a shell script via curl. Some have concerns about the security of this arrangement and would prefer to download and run the installer themselves.
• Validating signatures. Although rustup performs its downloads over HTTPS, the only way to verify the signatures of Rust installers today is to do so manually with the standalone installers.
• GUI installation and integration with “Add/Remove Programs” on Windows. rustup runs in the console and does not register its installation like typical Windows programs. If you prefer a more typical GUI installation on Windows there are standalone .msi installers. In the future rustup will also have a GUI installer on Windows.

Rust’s platform support is defined in three tiers, which correspond closely with the installation methods available: in general, the Rust project provides binary builds for all tier 1 and tier 2 platforms, and they are all installable via rustup. Some tier 2 platforms though have only the standard library available, not the compiler itself; that is, they are cross-compilation targets only; Rust code can run on those platforms, but they do not run the compiler itself. Such targets can be installed with the rustup target add command.

Other ways to install rustup

Please refer to rustup’s Other installation methods.

Standalone installers

The official Rust standalone installers contain a single release of Rust, and are suitable for offline installation. They come in three forms: tarballs (extension .tar.xz), that work in any Unix-like environment, Windows installers (.msi), and Mac installers (.pkg). These installers come with rustc, cargo, rustdoc, the standard library, and the standard documentation, but do not provide access to additional cross-targets like rustup does.

The most common reasons to use these are:

• Offline installation
• Preferring a more platform-integrated, graphical installer on Windows

Each of these binaries is signed with the Rust signing key, which is available on keybase.io, by the Rust build infrastructure, with GPG. In the tables below, the .asc files are the signatures.

Past releases can be found in the archive.

Source code

If you want to build the Rust toolchain from source code, you can use the following links to download source code tarballs.

If you want to make sure that the published source tarball matches what is in the rust git repository, you can use the following script as a template:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

# You can use either a commit SHA or a stable release version (e.g. 1.XY.Z)
TAG=a8cfc83801301c2b4f0fd030192e268eeb15d473
# TAG=1.77.1

# Clone Rust toolchain repository from GitHub
git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust
cd rust
git reset --hard ${TAG}

cat >config.toml << EOF
[rust]
# Use for a commit SHA
channel = "nightly"

# Use for a stable release
# channel = "stable"

[dist]
compression-formats = ["xz"]
compression-profile = "fast"
EOF

# Build the source tarball from git into build/dist/
./x dist rustc-src

# Download source tarball for a commit SHA
wget https://ci-artifacts.rust-lang.org/rustc-builds/${TAG}/rustc-nightly-src.tar.xz

# Download a source tarball for a stable release
# wget https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rustc-${TAG}-src.tar.xz

# Decompress the tarballs and check if they're the same
xz --decompress rustc-*-src.tar.xz
xz --decompress build/dist/rustc-*-src.tar.xz
diff rustc-*-src.tar build/dist/rustc-*-src.tar