Rust on Windows

Source: RUST 02: Installing RUST on Windows Without Visual Studio - YouTube and adapted with less dependencies and Workflow build - Magniquick/atuin-win · GitHub, Rust on Windows, No Visual Studio, link.exe, and rustup on Windows - Rust up docs

Installing Rust on Windows without Rustup or Visual Studio

Before shell steps below, install MSYS2 which does not require administrator rights. If you have administrator rights, install with Rustup instead.

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 tool chain 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 compiler frontend useful for development
pacman --noconfirm -Syu mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-rust-analyzer

Tool chain includes rustc, clippy, cargo, and other tools explained in the package files.

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 compiler and cargo 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 check Windows and C++
Scroll down to Build Tools for Visual Studio 2026 or current year 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