Cargo install action

Important

Versions prior to v3.2 will stop working on February 1st, 2025, due to GitHub changing their cache service APIs. See the @actions/cache package deprecation notice.

A GitHub Action that runs cargo install and automatically caches the resulting binaries to speed up subsequent builds.

Features

• Install any Rust binary crate from crates.io, git repositories or custom registries
• Automatically cache binaries to avoid repeated compilations
• Version range support to keep crates updated
• Works on Linux, Windows and MacOS runners

Usage

The following example steps install the cargo-hack and cargo-sort crates. Read Quickstart for GitHub Actions to learn more about Actions usage.

- name: Install cargo-hack from crates.io
  uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
  with:
    crate: cargo-hack
    version: '^0.5' # optional semver range (defaults to latest)

- name: Install cargo-sort from git
  uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
  with:
    crate: cargo-sort
    git: https://github.com/devinr528/cargo-sort
    tag: v1.0.9 # `branch` and `commit` are also supported

- name: Run cargo hack
  run: cargo hack --version

If no version or branch/tag/commit is specified, the latest version will be installed. The --locked flag is added by default to avoid breakages due to unexpected dependencies updates.

Input parameters

• crate (required): Name of the crate to install
• version: Version to install, supports semver range (default: latest)
• features: Space or comma-separated list of crate features to enable
• locked: Adds --locked flag to (default: true)
• args: Extra arguments for cargo install
• cache-key: Custom string added to the cache key to force-invalidate the cache

Git parameters

When installing from a git repository, the version parameter is ignored.

• git: URL of the git repository
• branch: git branch to install from
• tag: git tag to install from
• commit/rev: commit hash to install from

branch, tag and commit/rev are mutually exclusive. If none of them are specified, the latest commit of the default branch will be used.

Custom registry parameters

Version range resolution is only supported when using a sparse registry index with the index parameter. Otherwise, only exact versions can be used.

• index: Registry index URL
• registry: Registry name from the Cargo configuration (see Using an alternate registry on the Cargo Book)

registry and index are mutually exclusive.

Outputs

• version: Installed crate version (or commit hash for git installations)
• cache-hit: Boolean indicating whether the crate was restored from cache

Caching

Compiled binaries are cached in ~/.cargo-install/<crate-name>. The cache key contains a hash derived from the installation context (command arguments and os version).

Cache entries expire after 7 days of inactivity. For more details, see GitHub's caching documentation.

Security

Installation is done using the cargo binary installed in the runner.

When installing from crates.io or a custom sparse registry, the action resolves the latest version prior to installation. It is recommended to pin exact versions for sensitive workflows.

If using a git repository, the action uses git ls-remote to resolve the commit hash. The repository is cloned by cargo install.

Contributing

There is no particular contribution guidelines, feel free to open a new PR to improve the code. If you want to introduce a new feature, please create an issue before.