cargo-watch

Cargo-watch helps you shorten your fix, compile, run cycle by automatically building your project in the background whenever you make changes to your code. By default, this just runs Rust's type checker (the cargo check command) and does not undergo the code generation phase (which takes time) and shortens the compile time. A custom command can also be provided instead of cargo check using the -x flag.

We can install cargo-watch by running cargo install cargo-watch, and then within any Cargo project we can run it by invoking cargo watch. Now, whenever we make changes to our project, cargo-watch will run cargo check in the background and recompile the project for us. In the following code, we made a typo and corrected it, and cargo-watch recompiled the project for us:

This will be a very similar experience if you know about the watchman or nodemon packages from the Node.js ecosystem.