Crate Registry

The default way to release Rust crates (libraries and binaries) is to a Crate registry. The default crate registry for Rust is crates.io, with 150k crates published, almost a million crate versions and (at the time of writing) 77 million crate downloads, it is the largest repository of Rust code.

Publishing your crates on there is free, and it allows others to use the libraries you have written as simple as running cargo add your-library. If you publish your code there, the documentation for it is also generated automatically and published on docs.rs, Rust’s public crate documentation browser.

Any binary crates you have published there are easily installable by other Rust users with cargo install. For example, if you want to install ripgrep, a useful tool for searching through local git repositories, you can do so simply by running:

cargo install ripgrep

But in a commerical setting, you may have some internal crates that you want to share, but not publically. Using a crate repository makes for a more pleasant experience than having direct git dependencies, because Cargo supports semantic versioning (but this does not work with git dependencies). RFC 2141 specifies how this works, and today there are some commercial private crate registries that you can use, or you can even host your own registry.

Rust Crate Registry

Crates.io is the public Rust package index. It is free and used by the Rust community to share libraries and tooling. It integrates with docs.rs to automatically build and host documentation for any crates that are published to it.

To use it, all you need is a GitHub account. You can log in on their website and generate an API token. With that, you can log in using Cargo:

cargo login <api-token>

Once you are ready to publish your crate, you can do so using Cargo:

cargo publish

If you accidentally published a version that you did not intend to publish, you can yank it. Yanking does not delete it, to avoid situations like the left-pad disaster, where a developer deleted a package from NPM that a lot of JavaScript libraries relied upon, temporarily breaking the internet.

cargo yank

In order to be able to publish your package, it must contain some required metadata. See Publishing on crates.io for more details on what is required and how you can manage your packages.

Shipyard

Shipyard is a private cargo registry service. It replicates

JFrog

Kellnr

Kellnr

Reading

Chapter 14.2: Publishing to Crates.io in The Rust Book

In this section of the Rust book, it shows you how you can write a Rust crate and publish it on Rust’s crate index, crates.io.

Using the Shipyard private crate registry with Docker by Amos Wenger

Amos explains how you can publish your crates to a private crate registry hosted by Shipyard. He shows how you can configure Cargo to authenticate with Shipyard, and how to push packages to it both locally and from CI.