The Manifest Format
The Cargo.toml
file for each package is called its manifest. It is written
in the TOML format. It contains metadata that is needed to compile the package. Checkout
the cargo locate-project
section for more detail on how cargo finds the manifest file.
Every manifest file consists of the following sections:
cargo-features
— Unstable, nightly-only features.[package]
— Defines a package.name
— The name of the package.version
— The version of the package.authors
— The authors of the package.edition
— The Rust edition.rust-version
— The minimal supported Rust version.description
— A description of the package.documentation
— URL of the package documentation.readme
— Path to the package’s README file.homepage
— URL of the package homepage.repository
— URL of the package source repository.license
— The package license.license-file
— Path to the text of the license.keywords
— Keywords for the package.categories
— Categories of the package.workspace
— Path to the workspace for the package.build
— Path to the package build script.links
— Name of the native library the package links with.exclude
— Files to exclude when publishing.include
— Files to include when publishing.publish
— Can be used to prevent publishing the package.metadata
— Extra settings for external tools.default-run
— The default binary to run bycargo run
.autobins
— Disables binary auto discovery.autoexamples
— Disables example auto discovery.autotests
— Disables test auto discovery.autobenches
— Disables bench auto discovery.resolver
— Sets the dependency resolver to use.
- Target tables: (see configuration for settings)
[lib]
— Library target settings.[[bin]]
— Binary target settings.[[example]]
— Example target settings.[[test]]
— Test target settings.[[bench]]
— Benchmark target settings.
- Dependency tables:
[dependencies]
— Package library dependencies.[dev-dependencies]
— Dependencies for examples, tests, and benchmarks.[build-dependencies]
— Dependencies for build scripts.[target]
— Platform-specific dependencies.
[badges]
— Badges to display on a registry.[features]
— Conditional compilation features.[lints]
— Configure linters for this package.[patch]
— Override dependencies.[replace]
— Override dependencies (deprecated).[profile]
— Compiler settings and optimizations.[workspace]
— The workspace definition.
The [package]
section
The first section in a Cargo.toml
is [package]
.
[package]
name = "hello_world" # the name of the package
version = "0.1.0" # the current version, obeying semver
authors = ["Alice <[email protected]>", "Bob <[email protected]>"]
The only field required by Cargo is name
. If publishing to
a registry, the registry may require additional fields. See the notes below and
the publishing chapter for requirements for publishing to
crates.io.
The name
field
The package name is an identifier used to refer to the package. It is used when listed as a dependency in another package, and as the default name of inferred lib and bin targets.
The name must use only alphanumeric characters or -
or _
, and cannot be empty.
Note that cargo new
and cargo init
impose some additional restrictions on
the package name, such as enforcing that it is a valid Rust identifier and not
a keyword. crates.io imposes even more restrictions, such as:
- Only ASCII characters are allowed.
- Do not use reserved names.
- Do not use special Windows names such as “nul”.
- Use a maximum of 64 characters of length.
The version
field
Cargo bakes in the concept of Semantic Versioning, so make sure you follow some basic rules:
- Before you reach 1.0.0, anything goes, but if you make breaking changes, increment the minor version. In Rust, breaking changes include adding fields to structs or variants to enums.
- After 1.0.0, only make breaking changes when you increment the major version. Don’t break the build.
- After 1.0.0, don’t add any new public API (no new
pub
anything) in patch-level versions. Always increment the minor version if you add any newpub
structs, traits, fields, types, functions, methods or anything else. - Use version numbers with three numeric parts such as 1.0.0 rather than 1.0.
See the Resolver chapter for more information on how Cargo uses versions to resolve dependencies, and for guidelines on setting your own version. See the SemVer compatibility chapter for more details on exactly what constitutes a breaking change.
This field is optional and defaults to 0.0.0
. The field is required for publishing packages.
MSRV: Before 1.75, this field was required
The authors
field
The optional authors
field lists in an array the people or organizations that are considered
the “authors” of the package. The exact meaning is open to interpretation — it
may list the original or primary authors, current maintainers, or owners of the
package. An optional email address may be included within angled brackets at
the end of each author entry.
[package]
# ...
authors = ["Graydon Hoare", "Fnu Lnu <[email protected]>"]
This field is only surfaced in package metadata and in the CARGO_PKG_AUTHORS
environment variable within build.rs
. It is not displayed in the crates.io
user interface.
Warning: Package manifests cannot be changed once published, so this field cannot be changed or removed in already-published versions of a package.
The edition
field
The edition
key is an optional key that affects which Rust Edition your package
is compiled with. Setting the edition
key in [package]
will affect all
targets/crates in the package, including test suites, benchmarks, binaries,
examples, etc.
[package]
# ...
edition = '2021'
Most manifests have the edition
field filled in automatically by cargo new
with the latest stable edition. By default cargo new
creates a manifest with
the 2021 edition currently.
If the edition
field is not present in Cargo.toml
, then the 2015 edition is
assumed for backwards compatibility. Note that all manifests
created with cargo new
will not use this historical fallback because they
will have edition
explicitly specified to a newer value.
The rust-version
field
The rust-version
field is an optional key that tells cargo what version of the
Rust language and compiler your package can be compiled with. If the currently
selected version of the Rust compiler is older than the stated version, cargo
will exit with an error, telling the user what version is required.
The first version of Cargo that supports this field was released with Rust 1.56.0. In older releases, the field will be ignored, and Cargo will display a warning.
[package]
# ...
rust-version = "1.56"
The Rust version must be a bare version number with two or three components; it
cannot include semver operators or pre-release identifiers. Compiler pre-release
identifiers such as -nightly will be ignored while checking the Rust version.
The rust-version
must be equal to or newer than the version that first
introduced the configured edition
.
The rust-version
may be ignored using the --ignore-rust-version
option.
Setting the rust-version
key in [package]
will affect all targets/crates in
the package, including test suites, benchmarks, binaries, examples, etc.
To find the minimum rust-version
compatible with your project, you can use third-party tools like cargo-msrv
.
When used on packages that get published, we recommend verifying the rust-version
.
MSRV: Respected as of 1.56
The description
field
The description is a short blurb about the package. crates.io will display this with your package. This should be plain text (not Markdown).
[package]
# ...
description = "A short description of my package"
Note: crates.io requires the
description
to be set.
The documentation
field
The documentation
field specifies a URL to a website hosting the crate’s
documentation. If no URL is specified in the manifest file, crates.io will
automatically link your crate to the corresponding docs.rs page when the
documentation has been built and is available (see docs.rs queue).
[package]
# ...
documentation = "https://docs.rs/bitflags"
The readme
field
The readme
field should be the path to a file in the package root (relative
to this Cargo.toml
) that contains general information about the package.
This file will be transferred to the registry when you publish. crates.io
will interpret it as Markdown and render it on the crate’s page.
[package]
# ...
readme = "README.md"
If no value is specified for this field, and a file named README.md
,
README.txt
or README
exists in the package root, then the name of that
file will be used. You can suppress this behavior by setting this field to
false
. If the field is set to true
, a default value of README.md
will
be assumed.
The homepage
field
The homepage
field should be a URL to a site that is the home page for your
package.
[package]
# ...
homepage = "https://serde.rs"
A value should only be set for homepage
if there is a dedicated website for
the crate other than the source repository or API documentation. Do not make
homepage
redundant with either the documentation
or repository
values.
The repository
field
The repository
field should be a URL to the source repository for your
package.
[package]
# ...
repository = "https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo"
The license
and license-file
fields
The license
field contains the name of the software license that the package
is released under. The license-file
field contains the path to a file
containing the text of the license (relative to this Cargo.toml
).
crates.io interprets the license
field as an SPDX 2.3 license
expression. The name must be a known license
from the SPDX license list 3.20. See the SPDX site
for more information.
SPDX license expressions support AND and OR operators to combine multiple licenses.1
[package]
# ...
license = "MIT OR Apache-2.0"
Using OR
indicates the user may choose either license. Using AND
indicates
the user must comply with both licenses simultaneously. The WITH
operator
indicates a license with a special exception. Some examples:
MIT OR Apache-2.0
LGPL-2.1-only AND MIT AND BSD-2-Clause
GPL-2.0-or-later WITH Bison-exception-2.2
If a package is using a nonstandard license, then the license-file
field may
be specified in lieu of the license
field.
[package]
# ...
license-file = "LICENSE.txt"
Note: crates.io requires either
license
orlicense-file
to be set.
Previously multiple licenses could be separated with a /
, but that
usage is deprecated.
The keywords
field
The keywords
field is an array of strings that describe this package. This
can help when searching for the package on a registry, and you may choose any
words that would help someone find this crate.
[package]
# ...
keywords = ["gamedev", "graphics"]
Note: crates.io allows a maximum of 5 keywords. Each keyword must be ASCII text, have at most 20 characters, start with an alphanumeric character, and only contain letters, numbers,
_
,-
or.
The categories
field
The categories
field is an array of strings of the categories this package
belongs to.
categories = ["command-line-utilities", "development-tools::cargo-plugins"]
Note: crates.io has a maximum of 5 categories. Each category should match one of the strings available at https://crates.io/category_slugs, and must match exactly.
The workspace
field
The workspace
field can be used to configure the workspace that this package
will be a member of. If not specified this will be inferred as the first
Cargo.toml with [workspace]
upwards in the filesystem. Setting this is
useful if the member is not inside a subdirectory of the workspace root.
[package]
# ...
workspace = "path/to/workspace/root"
This field cannot be specified if the manifest already has a [workspace]
table defined. That is, a crate cannot both be a root crate in a workspace
(contain [workspace]
) and also be a member crate of another workspace
(contain package.workspace
).
For more information, see the workspaces chapter.
The build
field
The build
field specifies a file in the package root which is a build
script for building native code. More information can be found in the build
script guide.
[package]
# ...
build = "build.rs"
The default is "build.rs"
, which loads the script from a file named
build.rs
in the root of the package. Use build = "custom_build_name.rs"
to
specify a path to a different file or build = false
to disable automatic
detection of the build script.
The links
field
The links
field specifies the name of a native library that is being linked
to. More information can be found in the links
section of the build
script guide.
For example, a crate that links a native library called “git2” (e.g. libgit2.a
on Linux) may specify:
[package]
# ...
links = "git2"
The exclude
and include
fields
The exclude
and include
fields can be used to explicitly specify which
files are included when packaging a project to be published,
and certain kinds of change tracking (described below).
The patterns specified in the exclude
field identify a set of files that are
not included, and the patterns in include
specify files that are explicitly
included.
You may run cargo package --list
to verify which files will
be included in the package.
[package]
# ...
exclude = ["/ci", "images/", ".*"]
[package]
# ...
include = ["/src", "COPYRIGHT", "/examples", "!/examples/big_example"]
The default if neither field is specified is to include all files from the root of the package, except for the exclusions listed below.
If include
is not specified, then the following files will be excluded:
- If the package is not in a git repository, all “hidden” files starting with a dot will be skipped.
- If the package is in a git repository, any files that are ignored by the gitignore rules of the repository and global git configuration will be skipped.
Regardless of whether exclude
or include
is specified, the following files
are always excluded:
- Any sub-packages will be skipped (any subdirectory that contains a
Cargo.toml
file). - A directory named
target
in the root of the package will be skipped.
The following files are always included:
- The
Cargo.toml
file of the package itself is always included, it does not need to be listed ininclude
. - A minimized
Cargo.lock
is automatically included if the package contains a binary or example target, seecargo package
for more information. - If a
license-file
is specified, it is always included.
The options are mutually exclusive; setting include
will override an
exclude
. If you need to have exclusions to a set of include
files, use the
!
operator described below.
The patterns should be gitignore-style patterns. Briefly:
foo
matches any file or directory with the namefoo
anywhere in the package. This is equivalent to the pattern**/foo
./foo
matches any file or directory with the namefoo
only in the root of the package.foo/
matches any directory with the namefoo
anywhere in the package.- Common glob patterns like
*
,?
, and[]
are supported:*
matches zero or more characters except/
. For example,*.html
matches any file or directory with the.html
extension anywhere in the package.?
matches any character except/
. For example,foo?
matchesfood
, but notfoo
.[]
allows for matching a range of characters. For example,[ab]
matches eithera
orb
.[a-z]
matches letters a through z.
**/
prefix matches in any directory. For example,**/foo/bar
matches the file or directorybar
anywhere that is directly under directoryfoo
./**
suffix matches everything inside. For example,foo/**
matches all files inside directoryfoo
, including all files in subdirectories belowfoo
./**/
matches zero or more directories. For example,a/**/b
matchesa/b
,a/x/b
,a/x/y/b
, and so on.!
prefix negates a pattern. For example, a pattern ofsrc/*.rs
and!foo.rs
would match all files with the.rs
extension inside thesrc
directory, except for any file namedfoo.rs
.
The include/exclude list is also used for change tracking in some situations.
For targets built with rustdoc
, it is used to determine the list of files to
track to determine if the target should be rebuilt. If the package has a
build script that does not emit any rerun-if-*
directives, then the
include/exclude list is used for tracking if the build script should be re-run
if any of those files change.
The publish
field
The publish
field can be used to control which registries names the package
may be published to:
[package]
# ...
publish = ["some-registry-name"]
To prevent a package from being published to a registry (like crates.io) by mistake,
for instance to keep a package private in a company,
you can omit the version
field.
If you’d like to be more explicit, you can disable publishing:
[package]
# ...
publish = false
If publish array contains a single registry, cargo publish
command will use
it when --registry
flag is not specified.
The metadata
table
Cargo by default will warn about unused keys in Cargo.toml
to assist in
detecting typos and such. The package.metadata
table, however, is completely
ignored by Cargo and will not be warned about. This section can be used for
tools which would like to store package configuration in Cargo.toml
. For
example:
[package]
name = "..."
# ...
# Metadata used when generating an Android APK, for example.
[package.metadata.android]
package-name = "my-awesome-android-app"
assets = "path/to/static"
You’ll need to look in the documentation for your tool to see how to use this field.
For Rust Projects that use package.metadata
tables, see:
There is a similar table at the workspace level at
workspace.metadata
. While cargo does not specify a
format for the content of either of these tables, it is suggested that
external tools may wish to use them in a consistent fashion, such as referring
to the data in workspace.metadata
if data is missing from package.metadata
,
if that makes sense for the tool in question.
The default-run
field
The default-run
field in the [package]
section of the manifest can be used
to specify a default binary picked by cargo run
. For example, when there is
both src/bin/a.rs
and src/bin/b.rs
:
[package]
default-run = "a"
The [lints]
section
Override the default level of lints from different tools by assigning them to a new level in a table, for example:
[lints.rust]
unsafe_code = "forbid"
This is short-hand for:
[lints.rust]
unsafe_code = { level = "forbid", priority = 0 }
level
corresponds to the lint levels in rustc
:
forbid
deny
warn
allow
priority
is a signed integer that controls which lints or lint groups override other lint groups:
- lower (particularly negative) numbers have lower priority, being overridden
by higher numbers, and show up first on the command-line to tools like
rustc
To know which table under [lints]
a particular lint belongs under, it is the part before ::
in the lint
name. If there isn’t a ::
, then the tool is rust
. For example a warning
about unsafe_code
would be lints.rust.unsafe_code
but a lint about
clippy::enum_glob_use
would be lints.clippy.enum_glob_use
.
For example:
[lints.rust]
unsafe_code = "forbid"
[lints.clippy]
enum_glob_use = "deny"
Generally, these will only affect local development of the current package.
Cargo only applies these to the current package and not to dependencies.
As for dependents, Cargo suppresses lints from non-path dependencies with features like
--cap-lints
.
MSRV: Respected as of 1.74
The [badges]
section
The [badges]
section is for specifying status badges that can be displayed
on a registry website when the package is published.
Note: crates.io previously displayed badges next to a crate on its website, but that functionality has been removed. Packages should place badges in its README file which will be displayed on crates.io (see the
readme
field).
[badges]
# The `maintenance` table indicates the status of the maintenance of
# the crate. This may be used by a registry, but is currently not
# used by crates.io. See https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/2437
# and https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/2438 for more details.
#
# The `status` field is required. Available options are:
# - `actively-developed`: New features are being added and bugs are being fixed.
# - `passively-maintained`: There are no plans for new features, but the maintainer intends to
# respond to issues that get filed.
# - `as-is`: The crate is feature complete, the maintainer does not intend to continue working on
# it or providing support, but it works for the purposes it was designed for.
# - `experimental`: The author wants to share it with the community but is not intending to meet
# anyone's particular use case.
# - `looking-for-maintainer`: The current maintainer would like to transfer the crate to someone
# else.
# - `deprecated`: The maintainer does not recommend using this crate (the description of the crate
# can describe why, there could be a better solution available or there could be problems with
# the crate that the author does not want to fix).
# - `none`: Displays no badge on crates.io, since the maintainer has not chosen to specify
# their intentions, potential crate users will need to investigate on their own.
maintenance = { status = "..." }
Dependency sections
See the specifying dependencies page for
information on the [dependencies]
, [dev-dependencies]
,
[build-dependencies]
, and target-specific [target.*.dependencies]
sections.
The [profile.*]
sections
The [profile]
tables provide a way to customize compiler settings such as
optimizations and debug settings. See the Profiles chapter for
more detail.