Cargo install action

This action enables you to run cargo install in your GitHub workflows, and automatically caches the resulting binaries to speed up subsequent builds.

Warning

Versions prior to v3.2 will stop working on February 1st, 2025, due to GitHub changing their cache service APIs. See also the @actions/cache package deprecation warning.

Features

• Install any Rust binary crate from crates.io, a git repository or an alternate registry.
• Automatically cache installed binaries to avoid compiling them each run.
• Keep crates updated, with an optional version range to avoid breakages.
• Works on Linux, Windows and MacOS runners.

Usage

The following example steps install the cargo-hack and cargo-sort crates. Read Quickstart for GitHub Actions to learn more about Actions usage.

- name: Install cargo-hack from crates.io
  uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
  with:
    crate: cargo-hack
    version: '^0.5' # You can specify any semver range

- name: Install cargo-sort from git
  uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
  with:
    crate: cargo-sort
    git: https://github.com/devinr528/cargo-sort
    tag: v1.0.9 # `branch` and `commit` are also supported

- name: Run cargo hack
  run: cargo hack --version

If no version or branch/tag/commit is specified, the latest version will be installed. The --locked flag is added by default to avoid breakages due to unexpected dependencies updates.

Input parameters

• crate (required): Name of the crate to install.
• version: Version to install (defaults to the latest version). Supports any semver range. Only used when installing from crates.io, see below for git installation.
• features: Space or comma-separated list of crate features to enable.
• locked: Use the crate Cargo.lock if available (enabled by default). This adds --locked to the install command arguments.
• args: Additional arguments to pass to cargo install.
• cache-key: Additional string added to the cache key used to manually invalidate the cache.

Git parameters

• git: URL of the git repository to install from.
• branch: Branch to install from.
• tag: Tag to install from.
• commit/rev: Commit hash to install from.

branch, tag and commit/rev are mutually exclusive. If none of them are specified, the latest commit of the default branch will be used.

Alternate registry parameters

• registry: Registry name from the Cargo configuration. See Using an alternate registry on the Cargo Book.
• index: URL of the registry index.

registry and index are mutually exclusive. Only sparse index support version range resolution, you'll need to specify an exact version when using registry or a non-sparse index.

Outputs

• version: The version of the crate that has been installed.
• cache-hit: A boolean indicating whether the crate was restored from cache.

Caching

Compiled binaries of installed crates are automatically cached. If a cached version is present when the action is executed, it will be used. This allows the installation of the crate to be almost instant in most cases.

Cached binaries will be automatically removed by GitHub if they have not been accessed in the last 7 days. Read Caching dependencies to speed up workflows to learn more about caching with GitHub Actions.

Cache key details

The ~/.cargo-install/<crate-name> folder is cached with a cache key that follows the following pattern:

cargo-install-<crate>-<version or commit>-<hash>

The hash is derived from the action job and runner os name, os version and the installation arguments. The cache-key value is added to the hashed string if provided.

Security

Crates are installed using cargo install and the latest version is retrieved from the crates.io sparse index. You can ask to install a specific version by not using any semver range operator.

If using a git repository, the action will use git ls-remote to retrieve the commit hash. The repository is cloned by cargo install.

Contributing

There is no particular contribution guidelines, feel free to open a new PR to improve the code. If you want to introduce a new feature, please create an issue before.