Managing Projects with Cargo

Now that we are familiar with the language and how to write basic programs, we'll level up towards writing practical projects in Rust. For trivial programs that can be contained in a single file, compiling and building them manually is no big deal. In the real world, however, programs are split into multiple files for managing complexity and also have dependencies on other libraries. Compiling all of the source files manually and linking them together becomes a complicated process. For large-scale projects, the manual way is not a scalable solution as there could be hundreds of files and their dependencies. Fortunately, there are tools that automate building of large-scale software projects—package managers. This chapter explores how Rust manages large projects with its dedicated package manager and what features it provides to the developer to enhance their development experience. We will cover the following topics:

• Package managers
• Modules
• The Cargo package manager and crates (libraries) as units of compilation
• Creating and building projects
• Running tests
• Cargo subcommands and installing third-party binaries
• Editor integrations and setup in Visual Studio code

As a final exercise, we'll create imgtool, a trivial command-line tool that can rotate images from the command line using a library, and use Cargo to build and run our program. We have a lot to cover, so let's dive in!