cargo-bins/cargo-binstall

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2839 stars · 112 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

cargo-binstall is a Rust subcommand that installs prebuilt binaries of crates.io packages instead of compiling them from source with cargo install. It resolves crate metadata, finds matching release artifacts on the crate's repository or a third-party artifact host, and falls back to cargo install when no binary exists.

Use cases

• install rust cli tools without compiling from source
• speed up CI pipelines that install cargo tools
• replace cargo install with prebuilt binary downloads
• set up rust tooling on new machines quickly
• install specific versions of rust binaries unattended

When to choose

• you want drop-in cargo install behavior but much faster via prebuilt binaries
• you maintain CI that installs many rust tools and want to avoid long compile times
• you want automatic fallback to source builds when no binary artifact exists

When to avoid

• you need to build from source with custom feature flags or patches
• you only install crates that publish no binary artifacts
• you require a package manager with dependency resolution beyond single binaries

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

package-manager cli developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages windows cli rust cargo rust-binaries installer crates-io command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cargo-bins/cargo-binstall")