(new-post): Keeping your Rust toolchain and binaries up-to-date, the easy way

_posts/2024-05-09-keeping-your-rust-toolchain-and-binaries-up-to-date-the-easy-way.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Keeping your Rust toolchain and binaries up-to-date, the easy way
+date: 2024-05-09 04:18 -0500
+categories: ['rust', 'linux', 'cli']
+tags: ['rust', 'linux', 'cli']
+author: edu4rdshl
+image:
+  path: /rust-update.png
+  alt: Rust crab with a cable connector. Image from internet.
+excerpt: It's important to keep your Rust toolchain and binaries up-to-date. Here's how to do it the easy way.
+---
+
+## Introduction
+
+Rust is a programming language that has been gaining a lot of popularity in the last few years, and it's not a surprise, it's a very powerful language, with a lot of features that make it very attractive for developers, like zero-cost abstractions, move semantics, guaranteed memory safety, threads, and more. As usual, it's important to keep your tools up-to-date, and Rust is no exception. In this post, I'll show you how to keep your Rust toolchain and binaries up-to-date, in a very easy way.
+
+## Updating the Rust toolchain
+
+When you install Rust, you get a tool called `rustup`, which is a command-line tool that manages Rust versions and associated tools. With `rustup`, you can install, update, and switch between different versions of Rust, and it's the recommended way to install Rust for development purposes. If you don't have `rustup` installed, you can install it by following the instructions on the [official website](https://rustup.rs/).
+
+To update the Rust toolchain(s) that you have installed, run the following command:
+
+```bash
+$ rustup update && rustup self update
+```
+The first part of the command (`rustup update`) updates the Rust toolchain, and the second part (`rustup self update`) updates `rustup` itself.
+
+## What about additional tools?
+
+It's very common that you ends up installing additional tools that are part of the Rust ecosystem depending on the projects you are working on. Some common tools are `diesel_cli`, `cargo-edit`, `cargo-watch`, `cargo-audit`, and more. To make your life easier, you can install a tool called [cargo-update](https://github.com/nabijaczleweli/cargo-update), which is a cargo subcommand for checking and applying updates to installed executables. To install `cargo-update`, run the following command:
+
+```bash
+$ cargo install cargo-update
+```
+and then you can update all your installed tools by running:
+
+```bash
+$ cargo install-update -ag
+```
+
+## Putting it all together
+
+As you can see, it's now a lot easier to keep everything Rust-related up-to-date. However, running it manually every time is not something you want to do, do you? Let's create a simple systemd service and timer to run the updates automatically. Here's how you can do it:
+
+1. Create the service file:
+
+```bash
+$ systemctl --user edit --force --full rust-update.service
+```
+and put the following content:
+
+```ini
+[Unit]
+Description=Check Rust updates.
+
+[Service]
+Type=oneshot
+WorkingDirectory=/home/edu4rdshl
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash -c "rustup update"
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash -c "rustup self update"
+ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash -c "cargo install-update -ag |& grep -q 'error while loading shared libraries' && cargo install cargo-update --force && cargo install-update -ag || true"
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=default.target
+```
+**Note:** The last `ExecStart` line is a bit tricky, it checks if there's an error while loading shared libraries -hello ArchLinux users-, and if so, it force-installs `cargo-update` so that it gets rebuild and runs the updates again. This is basically a self-healing mechanism.
+
+2. Create the timer file:
+
+```bash
+$ systemctl --user edit --force --full rust-update.timer
+```
+and put the following content:
+
+```ini
+[Unit]
+Description=Check for rust updates every day.
+
+[Timer]
+OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:00
+Persistent=true
+
+[Install]
+WantedBy=timers.target
+```
+3. Enable and start the timer:
+
+```bash
+$ systemctl --user enable --now rust-update.timer
+```
+from now on, your Rust toolchain and binaries will be updated automatically every day at 3:00 AM.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Keeping your Rust toolchain and binaries up-to-date is important, and with the tools and techniques I've shown you in this post, you can do it in a very easy way. If you have any questions, feel free to reach me via any of the accounts in the left sidebar.
+
+Happy coding! 🦀