Any proper way to disable auto downloads of crates

[Float-Moon]

Hi anyone reading this. Everytime after adding creates to [dependencies] field of cargo.toml, rust-analyzer would automatically download these crates and build something. Is there any way to prevent this auto download?

I tried to disable checkOnSave and rust-analyzer.cargo.autoreload, but anaylzer worked badly this way. CARGO_NET_OFFLINE is another choice, however I'd like to only forbid auto-download, not manual download operations like cargo fetch.

I need a solution around this problem: AI agent could modify (add dependencies that's not what I want) the cargo.toml, then cargo-analyzer auto build them, which is time-consuming and takes a large disk space.

Thanks for your time. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Float-Moon]

I'm not sure whether it is suitable to metion here: also notice that command reload workspace

didn't behave the same as the option rust-analyzer.cargo.autoreload. It didn't refresh the metadata and left the status icon remained yellow:

[ChayimFriedman2]

The only solution is to use CARGO_NET_OFFLINE and then run cargo check (or similar command) directly when you do want to download. Not sure if this will require restarting rust-analyzer. I do not want to add another option - r-a does not really have a notion of "manual" Cargo command, and if your AI agent can write to Cargo.toml, it can probably also do other nefarious things. However if it does currently require a reload to r-a, then I do support adding a manual (cheaper) reload command.

[Float-Moon]

Thanks you for detailed suggestion and confirming my point! Aside from agent's overwrite to cargo.toml, sometimes I need to use the basic intellisense of rust-anaylzer to look into some source codes, when r-a do download all its dependencies.
It makes sense that r-a need to go through all these crates to function well, but takes too much space and all I want is auto-jump between functions.

[ChayimFriedman2]

Goto definition also requires this. Some support is possible (and will work if you use --offline) if all packages have one compatible version. If at least one package is completely missing, almost no r-a feature can work or can be made to work.

You can set the setting for global r-a so the default for new projects is offline.

[ShoyuVanilla]

Instead of setting CARGO_NET_OFFLINE for both your terminal and rust-analyzer, you could only set it for rust-analyzer.cargo.extraEnv. In this way, your manual commands like cargo fetch works in online while rust-analyzer triggers cargo in offline mode

[Float-Moon]

Thanks! I never thought of such solution, this is a workaround in my case!