portable-shortcuts-rs

Create portable shortcuts on a USB drive.

Why does this exist?

Sometimes, you have to do development work on multiple machines without admin access. One method is to install your environment onto a USB drive, then run the programs off of it. However, on different computers, Windows can assign different drive letters to a USB drive based on how many drive letters the system already has in use. This makes it very tricky to use simple shortcuts, though there are workarounds, which usually rely on the fact that a path like \foo\bar will be assigned the drive letter of the current working directory.

However, there are two shortcomings with the standard workarounds:

1. Some programs don't handle missing drive letters well
2. This method makes it hard to manage envrionment variables (particularly PATH)

This program uses Rust to generate and build executables that can intelligently configure the correct PATH and other environment variables, then launch a program from a USB drive, regardless of drive letter.

How to use

1. Clone the project onto the USB drive you plan on deploying to
2. Edit assets/config.toml as necessary
3. Run cargo build && cargo build && cargo run --bin portable-shortcuts. Yes, really. Explanation below.

How it works

Building and deploying is a 3-step process:

1. Build the project. This runs build.rs, which parses assets/config.toml, generating the source for each shortcut and leaving them in src/bin. However, because Cargo determines build targets before running build.rs, the generated source files don't actually get built.
2. Build the project again. This (probably) doesn't run build.rs again, but it does build all of the things in src/bin.
3. Run the built portable-shortcuts file. This reads assets/config.toml again and copies the built shortcuts from step 2 into their correct locations.

The template used for each shortcut is in assets/template.rs.