Publishing a set of inter-dependant crates in a rust cargo workspace project can be time consuming. The cargo workspace add-on is here to help you.

With my flow rust project, I have ended up with a workspace project with eight crates inside it (after moving some libraries into the same crate as the binary that uses them, it would be ten otherwise).

This works pretty well for me in rust, with cargo handling most things pretty nicely.

When combined with cargo’s ability to specify a local dependency it can use in–place of a specific (published) version:

[dependencies]
flowrstructs = {path = "../flowrstructs", version = "0.33.0"}

This work’s nicely for development of multiple crates in parallel. Especially in the earlier days of a project when the interfaces between crates are not clear and very unstable and you have to make changes to multiple crates at the same time.

There are still a few things you can find missing from cargo when using it in a workspace project, but not many and the number is decreasing over time as cargo developers fill in the gaps.

I have multiple dependencies between crates within the workspace, and I even had to separate out some structs into another crate to avoid a cyclic dependency. This dependency hierarchy is three or more levels deep.

When publishing crates, and wishing published crates to use the updated version of the other crates they depend upon, this became a time consuming manual task, and a real PITA.

For a while I codified the dependency structure into a makefile that took care of publishing new versions of crates in order.

A much better solution I have found that has been working for me well so far is the cargo workspaces add-on to cargo.

To quote from it’s crates.io entry:

A tool that optimizes the workflow around cargo workspaces with git and cargo
by providing utilities to version, publish, execute commands and more.

I mainly use the publish command, but the others may become useful for me over time.

I checkout master branch, type cargo ws publish, select the type of bump to the version numbers I want, check the list of crate to be published matches my expectations and then go and make a cup of tea, while it works its magic.

When I come back, the crates modified since the last time I published, have had their version number bumped, committed to git, and published into crates.io - in the order dictated by the dependency hierarchy of my workspace project.

The only gotcha I’ve seen so far, is that you can start to get into a bit of a mess if for some reason you need to update the versions manually in-between publishing with cargo workspace.

But it wasn’t too hard to get out of the mess and back on the smooth road.

Kudos to Pavan Kumar Sunkara for writing such a useful and time-saving tool for us rustaceans!