avsaase / cargo-new-script

cargo command to generate a cargo-script

cargo-new-script

cargo-new-script is a cargo command to quickly generate a cargo-script.

As of February 2024, cargo-script is available on nightly. See the tracking issues for cargo and rustc.

Installation

cargo install --git https://github.com/avsaase/cargo-new-script

Currently, only unix operating systems are supported.

Usage

cargo new-script my-script

This generates a file called my-script.rs in your current working directory:

#!/usr/bin/env -S cargo +nightly -Zscript
---
[dependencies]

---

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Run your script with ./my-script.rs. The generated script is already made executable.

See cargo new-script --help for limited options.

cargo-new-script's Issues

FR: add `--quiet` flag to shebang

this makes the output nicer, in my opinion:

warning: `package.edition` is unspecified, defaulting to `2021`
   Compiling hello_world v0.0.0 (/SNIP/cargo-new-script)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.10s
     Running `/SNIP/debug/hello_world`
Hello, world!

vs

Hello, world!

Set edition within the frontmatter

cargo new always sets the edition to "current" to avoid getting the 2015 edition. With cargo scripts, the default is "current" but it warns and if something is being scaffolded it should probably include that level of "boilerplate" to remove the warning and make the script work across Rust versions

Exporting an existing single-file .rs program to a cargo-script

cargo-script is obviously useful. however, developing a script is a little unpleasant since rust-analyzer doesn't currently support this single-file package form.

as an experiment (and for my own use) I've extended cargo-new-script with a new CLI option, which works as follows

1. takes a path to an existing .rs file
2. rather than generating a hello-world program, it uses the file's source code
3. rather than generating a frontmatter with empty dependencies, it uses the dependencies obtained from the surrounding project's Cargo.toml (then optionally runs cargo-udeps to remove unused dependencies)

if this is something you think we might be interested in, I can clean up my code and submit a PR.