Package Creation

Let's make sure all the prerequisites are in place. You should have followed the installation instructions to prepare your development environment. After those steps are complete, you should be able to run the following commands:

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.81.0 (eeb90cda1 2024-09-04)

$ cargo --version
cargo 1.81.0 (2dbb1af80 2024-08-20)

The version numbers might be different, but the output should look relatively similar.

If the above commands worked, you're ready to go!

1. Use cargo new grep to create a new Rust package named grep for our project:

   $ cargo new grep
   ∙
       Creating binary (application) `grep` package
   note: see more `Cargo.toml` keys and their definitions at
   https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html
   

2. Navigate to the grep directory and use cargo run to build and run the program:

   $ cd grep
   $ cargo run
      Compiling grep v0.1.0 (S:\projects\git\grep)
       Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.43s
        Running `target\debug\grep.exe`
   Hello, world!
   

3. Explore some of the other actions you can perform with cargo using cargo --help.

   • cargo build - compile the current package
   • cargo build --release - build the project in release mode (with optimizations)
   • cargo check - analyze the current package and report errors (no object files generated)
   • cargo test - run unit tests
   • and more...

Summary

In this section, we:

• Created a package.
• Compiled and ran the boilerplate code.
• Learned a bit about Cargo.

Next

Let's see what cargo new actually did!