Crate Registries

The standard way to distribute Rust crates is through a registry. Crates.io is the public registry used by the Rust community. It is free, integrates with docs.rs for automatic documentation hosting, and is where the vast majority of open-source Rust libraries are published. Publishing a library there makes it available to anyone via cargo add, and binary crates can be installed with cargo install.

Publishing to crates.io

To publish, you need a GitHub account to log in to crates.io and generate an API token. Authenticate with Cargo and publish:

cargo login <api-token>
cargo publish

Your crate must include certain metadata in Cargo.toml (name, version, license, description) before it can be published. See Publishing on crates.io for the full requirements.

If you publish a version by mistake, you can yank it. Yanking prevents new projects from depending on that version, but does not delete it — existing projects that already depend on it continue to work. This avoids the kind of breakage seen in the left-pad incident, where deleting a package from NPM broke a large part of the JavaScript ecosystem.

cargo yank --version 1.2.3

Private Registries

In a commercial setting, you may have internal crates that you want to share within your organization but not publish publicly. While Cargo supports git dependencies, a private registry is preferable because it enables semantic versioning and version resolution — features that do not work with git dependencies. RFC 2141 specifies how alternative registries work with Cargo.

Several private registry options exist:

• Shipyard is a hosted private registry service. It replicates the crates.io experience for private crates, with authentication and access control.
• Kellnr is a self-hosted private registry that you can run on your own infrastructure.
• JFrog Artifactory supports Cargo registries as part of its broader artifact management platform, alongside npm, Maven, Docker, and other package formats.

To configure Cargo to use an alternative registry, add it to your .cargo/config.toml:

[registries.my-registry]
index = "sparse+https://my-registry.example.com/index/"

Then publish to it or depend on crates from it:

cargo publish --registry my-registry

[dependencies]
my-internal-crate = { version = "1.0", registry = "my-registry" }

Reading