Rust on Windows

Source: RUST 02: Installing RUST on Windows Without Visual Studio - YouTube and adapted with less dependencies and atuin-win/.github/workflows/build.yml at main · Magniquick/atuin-win · GitHub

Installing Rust on Windows without Rustup or Visual Studio

Before shell steps below, install MSYS2. For detailed steps, see the source video.

# Open a Windows terminal like in PowerShell or cmd
# Go into the UCRT64 system of MSYS2
ucrt64

Then install rust toolchain in MSYS2

# Install rust toolchain
pacman --noconfirm -Syu mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-rust
# --noconfirm - do not prompt for confirmation
# mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-rust - installs rust compiler rustc, cargo

# Optionally, install rust-analyzer, a compilar frontend useful for development
pacman --noconfirm -Syu mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-rust-analyzer

To access the rust executables from Windows, add them to your user’s path. Find the MSYS2 binaries for the UCRT64 system. For example, if MSYS2 was installed:

• With standard installer, the binary folder is C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin
• By scoop, the binary folder is C:\Users\yourusername\scoop\apps\msys2\current\ucrt64\bin

# Add to user's path, use the path to the correct folder for your MSYS2 install
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $Env:Path + ";C:\Users\yourusername\scoop\apps\msys2\current\ucrt64\bin;C:\Users\yourusername\.cargo\bin", "User")
# Also adds the cargo binaries folder
# Close the shell session to see the new path

# In a new PowerShell session, check rust is installed
Get-Command rustc
Get-Command cargo

Installing with Rustup

Install Visual Studio Tools

This option only installs the command line tools which is smaller instead of the full Visual Studio suite.

• Go to Download Visual Studio Tools - Install Free for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Scroll down and make sure Windows and C++ are clicked
• Scroll down to Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022 and Download and install it
• Start the installation, and choose Desktop C++ for the install tools

Install with Rustup

• Install with rustup.rs - The Rust toolchain installer

Optional: Install Tools

Install a rustfmt (formatter), clippy (linter), and rust-analyzer (language server) to support development:

rustup component add rustfmt clippy rust-analyzer