Publishing on crates.io

Once you've got a library that you'd like to share with the world, it's time to publish it on crates.io! Publishing a crate is when a specific version is uploaded to be hosted on crates.io.

Take care when publishing a crate, because a publish is permanent. The version can never be overwritten, and the code cannot be deleted. There is no limit to the number of versions which can be published, however.

Before your first publish

First thing’s first, you’ll need an account on crates.io to acquire an API token. To do so, visit the home page and log in via a GitHub account (required for now). After this, visit your Account Settings page and run the cargo login command specified.

$ cargo login abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345

This command will inform Cargo of your API token and store it locally in your ~/.cargo/config. Note that this token is a secret and should not be shared with anyone else. If it leaks for any reason, you should regenerate it immediately.

Before publishing a new crate

Keep in mind that crate names on crates.io are allocated on a first-come-first- serve basis. Once a crate name is taken, it cannot be used for another crate.

Packaging a crate

The next step is to package up your crate into a format that can be uploaded to crates.io. For this we’ll use the cargo package subcommand. This will take our entire crate and package it all up into a *.crate file in the target/package directory.

$ cargo package

As an added bonus, the *.crate will be verified independently of the current source tree. After the *.crate is created, it’s unpacked into target/package and then built from scratch to ensure that all necessary files are there for the build to succeed. This behavior can be disabled with the --no-verify flag.

Now’s a good time to take a look at the *.crate file to make sure you didn’t accidentally package up that 2GB video asset. There is currently a 10MB upload size limit on *.crate files. Cargo will automatically ignore files ignored by your version control system when packaging, but if you want to specify an extra set of files to ignore you can use the exclude key in the manifest:

[package]
# ...
exclude = [
    "public/assets/*",
    "videos/*",
]

The syntax of each element in this array is what rust-lang/glob accepts. If you’d rather roll with a whitelist instead of a blacklist, Cargo also supports an include key:

[package]
# ...
include = [
    "**/*.rs",
    "Cargo.toml",
]

Uploading the crate

Now that we’ve got a *.crate file ready to go, it can be uploaded to crates.io with the cargo publish command. And that’s it, you’ve now published your first crate!

$ cargo publish

If you’d like to skip the cargo package step, the cargo publish subcommand will automatically package up the local crate if a copy isn’t found already.

Be sure to check out the metadata you can specify to ensure your crate can be discovered more easily!

Publishing a new version of an existing crate

In order to release a new version, change the version value specified in your Cargo.toml manifest. Keep in mind the semver rules. Then optionally run cargo package if you want to inspect the *.crate file for the new version before publishing, and run cargo publish to upload the new version.

Managing a crates.io-based crate

Management of crates is primarily done through the command line cargo tool rather than the crates.io web interface. For this, there are a few subcommands to manage a crate.

cargo yank

Occasions may arise where you publish a version of a crate that actually ends up being broken for one reason or another (syntax error, forgot to include a file, etc.). For situations such as this, Cargo supports a “yank” of a version of a crate.

$ cargo yank --vers 1.0.1
$ cargo yank --vers 1.0.1 --undo

A yank does not delete any code. This feature is not intended for deleting accidentally uploaded secrets, for example. If that happens, you must reset those secrets immediately.

The semantics of a yanked version are that no new dependencies can be created against that version, but all existing dependencies continue to work. One of the major goals of crates.io is to act as a permanent archive of crates that does not change over time, and allowing deletion of a version would go against this goal. Essentially a yank means that all projects with a Cargo.lock will not break, while any future Cargo.lock files generated will not list the yanked version.

cargo owner

A crate is often developed by more than one person, or the primary maintainer may change over time! The owner of a crate is the only person allowed to publish new versions of the crate, but an owner may designate additional owners.

$ cargo owner --add my-buddy
$ cargo owner --remove my-buddy
$ cargo owner --add github:rust-lang:owners
$ cargo owner --remove github:rust-lang:owners

The owner IDs given to these commands must be GitHub user names or GitHub teams.

If a user name is given to --add, that user becomes a “named” owner, with full rights to the crate. In addition to being able to publish or yank versions of the crate, they have the ability to add or remove owners, including the owner that made them an owner. Needless to say, you shouldn’t make people you don’t fully trust into a named owner. In order to become a named owner, a user must have logged into crates.io previously.

If a team name is given to --add, that team becomes a “team” owner, with restricted right to the crate. While they have permission to publish or yank versions of the crate, they do not have the ability to add or remove owners. In addition to being more convenient for managing groups of owners, teams are just a bit more secure against owners becoming malicious.

The syntax for teams is currently github:org:team (see examples above). In order to add a team as an owner one must be a member of that team. No such restriction applies to removing a team as an owner.

GitHub Permissions

Team membership is not something GitHub provides simple public access to, and it is likely for you to encounter the following message when working with them:

It looks like you don’t have permission to query a necessary property from GitHub to complete this request. You may need to re-authenticate on crates.io to grant permission to read GitHub org memberships. Just go to https://crates.io/login

This is basically a catch-all for “you tried to query a team, and one of the five levels of membership access control denied this”. That is not an exaggeration. GitHub’s support for team access control is Enterprise Grade.

The most likely cause of this is simply that you last logged in before this feature was added. We originally requested no permissions from GitHub when authenticating users, because we didn’t actually ever use the user’s token for anything other than logging them in. However to query team membership on your behalf, we now require the read:org scope.

You are free to deny us this scope, and everything that worked before teams were introduced will keep working. However you will never be able to add a team as an owner, or publish a crate as a team owner. If you ever attempt to do this, you will get the error above. You may also see this error if you ever try to publish a crate that you don’t own at all, but otherwise happens to have a team.

If you ever change your mind, or just aren’t sure if crates.io has sufficient permission, you can always go to https://crates.io/login, which will prompt you for permission if crates.io doesn’t have all the scopes it would like to.

An additional barrier to querying GitHub is that the organization may be actively denying third party access. To check this, you can go to:

https://github.com/organizations/:org/settings/oauth_application_policy

where :org is the name of the organization (e.g. rust-lang). You may see something like:

Where you may choose to explicitly remove crates.io from your organization’s blacklist, or simply press the “Remove Restrictions” button to allow all third party applications to access this data.

Alternatively, when crates.io requested the read:org scope, you could have explicitly whitelisted crates.io querying the org in question by pressing the “Grant Access” button next to its name: