Cargo B(inary)Install

Binstall provides a low-complexity mechanism for installing Rust binaries as an alternative to building from source (via cargo install) or manually downloading packages. This is intended to work with existing CI artifacts and infrastructure, and with minimal overhead for package maintainers.

Binstall works by fetching the crate information from crates.io and searching the linked repository for matching releases and artifacts, falling back to the quickinstall third-party artifact host, to alternate targets as supported, and finally to cargo install as a last resort.

You may want to see this page as it was when the latest version was published.

Usage

$ cargo binstall radio-sx128x@0.14.1-alpha.5
cargo-binstall:  INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'radio-sx128x@=0.14.1-alpha.5'
cargo-binstall:  WARN The package radio-sx128x v0.14.1-alpha.5 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) has been downloaded from github.com
cargo-binstall:  INFO This will install the following binaries:
cargo-binstall:  INFO   - sx128x-util (sx128x-util-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu -> /home/.cargo/bin/sx128x-util)
Do you wish to continue? [yes]/no
? yes
cargo-binstall:  INFO Installing binaries...
cargo-binstall:  INFO Done in 2.838798298s

Binstall aims to be a drop-in replacement for cargo install in many cases, and supports similar options.

For unattended use (e.g. in CI), use the --no-confirm flag. For additional options please see cargo binstall --help.

For Crate Authors

To support cargo binstall for your crate, add metadata to your Cargo.toml and publish pre-built binaries to GitHub Releases on each release.

See SUPPORT.md for full documentation on the metadata format, artifact naming, and supported options.

Installation

If you already have it

To upgrade cargo-binstall, use cargo binstall cargo-binstall!

Quickly

Here are one-liners for downloading and installing a pre-compiled cargo-binstall binary.

Linux and macOS

curl -L --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.sh | bash

or if you have homebrew installed:

brew install cargo-binstall

Windows

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope Process; iex (iwr "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.ps1").Content

Manually

Download the relevant package for your system below, unpack it, and move the cargo-binstall executable into $HOME/.cargo/bin:

From source

With a recent Rust installed:

cargo install cargo-binstall --locked

In GitHub Actions

We provide a first-party, minimal action that installs Binstall:

- uses: cargo-bins/cargo-binstall@main
  with:
      version: "1.2.3" # optional; defaults to latest

For more features, we recommend the excellent taiki-e/install-action, which has dedicated support for selected tools and uses Binstall for everything else.

Companion tools

These are useful third-party tools which work well with Binstall.

cargo-update

While you can upgrade crates explicitly by running cargo binstall again, cargo-update takes care of updating all tools as needed. It automatically uses Binstall to install the updates if it is present.

cargo-run-bin

Binstall and cargo install both install tools globally by default, which is fine for system-wide tools. When installing tooling for a project, however, you may prefer to both scope the tools to that project and control their versions in code. That's where cargo-run-bin comes in, with a dedicated section in your Cargo.toml and a short cargo subcommand. When Binstall is available, it installs from binary whenever possible... and you can even manage Binstall itself with cargo-run-bin!

Unsupported crates

Binstall is generally smart enough to auto-detect artifacts in most situations. However, if a package fails to install, you can manually specify the pkg-url, bin-dir, and pkg-fmt as needed at the command line, with values as documented in SUPPORT.md.

$ cargo-binstall \
  --pkg-url="{ repo }/releases/download/{ version }/{ name }-{ version }-{ target }.{ archive-format }" \
  --pkg-fmt="txz" \
  crate_name

Maintainers wanting to make their users' life easier can add explicit Binstall metadata to Cargo.toml to locate the appropriate binary package for a given version and target.

Signatures

We have initial, limited support for maintainers to specify a signing public key and where to find package signatures. With this enabled, Binstall will download and verify signatures for that package.

You can use --only-signed to refuse to install packages if they're not signed.

If you like to live dangerously (please don't use this outside testing), you can use --skip-signatures to disable checking or even downloading signatures at all.

FAQ

Why use this?

Because wget-ing releases is frustrating, cargo install takes a not inconsequential portion of forever on constrained devices, and often putting together actual packages is overkill.

Why use the cargo manifest?

Crates already have these, and they already contain a significant portion of the required information. Also, there's this great and woefully underused (IMO) [package.metadata] field.

Is this secure?

Yes and also no?

We have initial support for verifying signatures, but not a lot of the ecosystem produces signatures at the moment. See #1 to discuss more on this.

We always pull the metadata from crates.io over HTTPS, and verify the checksum of the crate tar. We also enforce using HTTPS with TLS >= 1.2 for the actual download of the package files.

Compared to something like a curl ... | sh script, we're not running arbitrary code, but of course the crate you're downloading a package for might itself be malicious!

What do the error codes mean?

You can find a full description of errors including exit codes here: https://docs.rs/binstalk/latest/binstalk/errors/enum.BinstallError.html

Are debug symbols available?

Yes! Extra pre-built packages with a .full suffix are available and contain split debuginfo, documentation files, and extra binaries like the detect-wasi utility.

Telemetry collection

Some crate installation strategies may collect anonymized usage statistics by default. Currently, only the name of the crate to be installed, its version, the target platform triple, and the collecting user agent are sent to endpoints under the https://cargo-quickinstall-stats-server.fly.dev/record-install URL when the quickinstall artifact host is used. The maintainers of the quickinstall project use this data to determine which crate versions are most worthwhile to build and host. The aggregated collected telemetry is publicly accessible at https://alsuren.grafana.net/public-dashboards/12d4ec3edf2548a1850a813e00592b53. Should you be interested on it, the backend code for these endpoints can be found at https://github.com/cargo-bins/cargo-quickinstall/tree/main/stats-server.

If you prefer not to participate in this data collection, you can opt out by any of the following methods:

• Setting the --disable-telemetry flag in the command line interface.
• Setting the BINSTALL_DISABLE_TELEMETRY environment variable to true.
• Disabling the quickinstall strategy with --disable-strategies quick-install, or if specifying a list of strategies to use with --strategies, avoiding including quickinstall in that list.
• Adding quick-install to the disabled-strategies configuration key in the crate metadata (refer to the related support documentation for more details).

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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.