Rust Cargo Cheat Sheet

Reference for Cargo commands, Cargo.toml structure, dependency management, workspaces, and common cargo subcommands for building and testing Rust projects.

2 PagesBeginnerApr 12, 2026

Basic Commands

The core cargo workflow for building and running projects.

bash

cargo new my_project        # Create a new binary projectcargo new --lib my_lib      # Create a new library projectcargo build                 # Compile in debug mode (target/debug)cargo build --release       # Compile with optimizations (target/release)cargo run                   # Build and run the binarycargo run -- arg1 arg2      # Pass arguments to the binarycargo check                 # Fast type-check without producing a binarycargo test                  # Run all testscargo test test_name        # Run tests matching a name filter

Cargo.toml

The project manifest that declares metadata and dependencies.

yaml

[package]name = "my_project"version = "0.1.0"edition = "2021"[dependencies]serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }rand = "0.8"[dev-dependencies]criterion = "0.5"[profile.release]opt-level = 3lto = true

Common Subcommands

Frequently used cargo tooling commands.

cargo fmt- Formats source code according to rustfmt rules
cargo clippy- Runs the Clippy linter for idiomatic-code suggestions and common mistakes
cargo doc --open- Builds and opens crate documentation in a browser
cargo add <crate>- Adds a dependency to Cargo.toml (Cargo 1.62+)
cargo update- Updates dependencies in Cargo.lock to the latest compatible versions
cargo publish- Publishes the crate to crates.io
cargo tree- Prints the dependency tree, useful for debugging version conflicts
cargo clean- Removes the target directory build artifacts

Workspaces

Managing multiple related crates in a single repository.

toml

# Top-level Cargo.toml for a multi-crate workspace[workspace]members = [    "app",    "core",    "cli",]resolver = "2"[workspace.dependencies]serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }# cargo build --workspace   # Build every crate in the workspace# cargo test -p core        # Run tests only for the "core" package

Dependency Version Specs

Syntax for constraining dependency versions in Cargo.toml.

"1.2.3"- Caret requirement (default); allows updates that don't change the leftmost non-zero digit
"=1.2.3"- Exact version requirement, no automatic updates
"~1.2"- Tilde requirement; allows patch-level updates only (1.2.x)
git = "url"- Pulls a dependency directly from a Git repository
path = "../local-crate"- Uses a local path dependency, common in workspaces
features = [...]- Enables optional, opt-in functionality exposed by the dependency
default-features = false- Disables a dependency's default feature set to reduce compile time/size

Pro Tip

Commit Cargo.lock for binary applications (reproducible builds) but omit it for libraries, so downstream consumers resolve dependency versions against their own lockfile.

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