[Ubuntu News] Devpack for Rust: Zero to Rust in seconds

[xSicKxBot]

One of the best things about Rust is how easy it is to get started. It takes just a second to

Code:

snap install rustup; rustup default stable

, and from there you have a whole toolchain ready to compile Rust code. But with this ease of use comes a giant ecosystem, and with this giant ecosystem comes confusion: What IDE (integrated development environment) should I use? What command-line tooling is there, and which ones are worth using?

Today, we’re announcing Devpack for Rust, the next entry in our devpack series. The Rust devpack is a snap with a collection of tools making it easy to get started with Rust: your favorite Rust version via Rustup, an IDE, and your choice from a suite of Rusty command-line utilities and tooling. It’s all in one command and runs anywhere snap does. Beginners to Rust will appreciate the curated list of options, and Rust veterans might discover some tools they hadn’t known about.

Install the Devpack for Rust with:

Code:

sudo snap install devpack-for-rust --classic

Use the arrow keys (or HJKL) to navigate the tree, and use space/enter to choose which programs to install. The tool will then automatically install Rustup and then use it to compile many of the tools (with some of them coming directly from the Snap store).



What tools come with the devpack? Your author’s most-used program here is

Code:

ripgrep

, which recursively searches the filesystem for files containing a string. In a close second place is

Code:

fd

, which recursively searches the filesystem based on the files’ names instead of their contents. Both of them are rewrites of classic C tools (

Code:

grep

and

Code:

find

), using Rust’s fearless concurrency and its higher-level ergonomics for a better user experience. In a similar vein, we use

Code:

just

internally quite a lot, when we have complicated command-line recipes but don’t need the additional complexity and cruft of

Code:

make

.

Are there any Rusty tools that you wish were here? Open an issue or a pull request! Devpack for Rust is open source at https://github.com/canonical/devpack-for-rust/.

Get in touch with us
Read our Rust documentation ›