rustlings/website/content/_index.md

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Small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code - Recommended in parallel to reading the official Rust book 📚️

Getting Started

Installing Rust

Before installing Rustlings, you need to have the latest version of Rust installed. Visit www.rust-lang.org/tools/install for further instructions on installing Rust. This will also install Cargo, Rust's package/project manager.

🐧 If you are on Linux, make sure you have installed gcc (for a linker).

Deb: sudo apt install gcc

Dnf: sudo dnf install gcc

🍎 If you are on MacOS, make sure you have installed Xcode and its developer tools by running xcode-select --install.

Installing Rustlings

The following command will download and compile Rustlings:

cargo install rustlings

If the installation fails… (click to expand)

• Make sure you have the latest Rust version by running rustup update
• Try adding the --locked flag: cargo install rustlings --locked
• Otherwise, please report the issue

Initialization

After installing Rustlings, run the following command to initialize the rustlings/ directory:

rustlings init

If the command rustlings can't be found… (click to expand)

You are probably using Linux and installed Rust using your package manager.

Cargo installs binaries to the directory ~/.cargo/bin. Sadly, package managers often don't add ~/.cargo/bin to your PATH environment variable.

The solution is to …

• either add ~/.cargo/bin manually to PATH
• or to uninstall Rust from the package manager and install it using the official way with rustup: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

Now, go into the newly initialized directory and launch Rustlings for further instructions on getting started with the exercises:

cd rustlings/
rustlings

Working environment

Editor

Our general recommendation is VS Code with the rust-analyzer plugin. But any editor that supports rust-analyzer should be enough for working on the exercises.

Terminal

While working with Rustlings, please use a modern terminal for the best user experience. The default terminal on Linux and Mac should be sufficient. On Windows, we recommend the Windows Terminal.

Doing exercises

The exercises are sorted by topic and can be found in the subdirectory exercises/<topic>. For every topic, there is an additional README.md file with some resources to get you started on the topic. We highly recommend that you have a look at them before you start 📚️

Most exercises contain an error that keeps them from compiling, and it's up to you to fix it! Some exercises contain tests that need to pass for the exercise to be done ✅

Search for TODO and todo!() to find out what you need to change. Ask for hints by entering h in the watch mode 💡

Watch Mode

After the initialization, Rustlings can be launched by simply running the command rustlings.

This will start the watch mode which walks you through the exercises in a predefined order (what we think is best for newcomers). It will rerun the current exercise automatically every time you change the exercise's file in the exercises/ directory.

If detecting file changes in the exercises/ directory fails… (click to expand)

You can add the --manual-run flag (rustlings --manual-run) to manually rerun the current exercise by entering r in the watch mode.

Please report the issue with some information about your operating system and whether you run Rustlings in a container or virtual machine (e.g. WSL).

Exercise List

In the watch mode (after launching rustlings), you can enter l to open the interactive exercise list.

The list allows you to…

• See the status of all exercises (done or pending)
• c: Continue at another exercise (temporarily skip some exercises or go back to a previous one)
• r: Reset status and file of the selected exercise (you need to reload/reopen its file in your editor afterwards)

See the footer of the list for all possible keys.

Questions?

If you need any help while doing the exercises and the builtin-hints aren't helpful, feel free to ask in the Q&A category of the discussions if your question wasn't asked yet 💡

Continuing On

Once you've completed Rustlings, put your new knowledge to good use! Continue practicing your Rust skills by building your own projects, contributing to Rustlings, or finding other open-source projects to contribute to.

Uninstalling Rustlings

If you want to remove Rustlings from your system, run the following command:

cargo uninstall rustlings