Cargo Upstall

This is a cargo sub-command that wraps around cargo install checking the currently installed version against crates.io and forcing install if the currently installed version is out of date.

Currently this will only work with crates.io crates but hopefully I will be able to support github crates in the near future.

Why?

When working on another rust project I wanted to deploy a Rust web server to Heroku. Unfortunately the build times for my application were getting close to the time limit and the biggest culprit was forcing install of some rust binary crates. This sub-command does cost a little since we need to check the registry and the installed versions but it drastically reduced my build times from commit to commit.

How?

Cargo keeps an inventory of the installed binaries in a file called .crates.toml. For global installs this is located inside of CARGO_HOME. Once we have the currently installed version we can validate that against https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/:crate_name, which should provide the latest published version. If the two don't match we perform cargo install [name] --force otherwise move on.

To Do

• Add GitHub Crate Installs
• Add GitLab Crate Installs
• Add BitBucket Crate Installs
• Apply lessons learned to cargo install itself by adding the --update flag