Rust Workspaces

Since I started Learning Rust, I've been quite amazed by the amount of built-in, standardized, coding tools it is provided with, from a package manager, to build tools, style guides, and more!

I'm not sure yet if this comes as a result of great design and thoughtful architecture, or as a sign of a small community and/or a young language, probably a bit of both. Maybe one day people will start creating their own Rust build tools, runtime, and compiler like pnpm is today an alternative to npm, and Deno an alternative to Node.js. In the meantime, I quite enjoy the standardization.

Anyway. Today I've learned about Rust built-in workspace support. Similarly to npm's workspaces, they allow you to develop multiple packages within the same codebase, i.e. developing within a monorepo.

To leverage them, we just need to create a directory featuring a root Cargo.toml declaring our workspace.

[workspace]
members = [
	"src",
	"examples/hello-world"
]

From here we can just create those crates using cargo

cargo new src --lib
cargo new examples/hello-world

And here we go! Now running cargo build or other commands will execute them across all crates declared within the workspace.

First published: 04/28/2023