Greetings and welcome to rustlings. This project contains small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code. This includes reading and responding to compiler messages!

...looking for the old, web-based version of Rustlings? Try here

Alternatively, for a first-time Rust learner, there are several other resources:

• The Book - The most comprehensive resource for learning Rust, but a bit theoretical sometimes. You will be using this along with Rustlings!
• Rust By Example - Learn Rust by solving little exercises! It's almost like rustlings, but online

Getting Started

Note: If you're on MacOS, make sure you've installed Xcode and its developer tools by typing xcode-select --install. Note: If you're on Linux, make sure you've installed gcc. Deb: sudo apt install gcc. Yum: sudo yum -y install gcc.

You will need to have Rust installed. You can get it by visiting https://rustup.rs. This'll also install Cargo, Rust's package/project manager.

MacOS/Linux

Just run:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/rustlings/main/install.sh | bash

Or if you want it to be installed to a different path:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/rustlings/main/install.sh | bash -s mypath/

This will install Rustlings and give you access to the rustlings command. Run it to get started!

Nix

Basically: Clone the repository at the latest tag, finally run nix develop or nix-shell.

# find out the latest version at https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/releases/latest (on edit 5.5.1)
git clone -b 5.5.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings
cd rustlings
# if nix version > 2.3
nix develop
# if nix version <= 2.3
nix-shell

Windows

In PowerShell (Run as Administrator), set ExecutionPolicy to RemoteSigned:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

Then, you can run:

Start-BitsTransfer -Source https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/rustlings/main/install.ps1 -Destination $env:TMP/install_rustlings.ps1; Unblock-File $env:TMP/install_rustlings.ps1; Invoke-Expression $env:TMP/install_rustlings.ps1

To install Rustlings. Same as on MacOS/Linux, you will have access to the rustlings command after it. Keep in mind that this works best in PowerShell, and any other terminals may give you errors.

If you get a permission denied message, you might have to exclude the directory where you cloned Rustlings in your antivirus.

Browser

Manually

Basically: Clone the repository at the latest tag, run cargo install --path ..

# find out the latest version at https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/releases/latest (on edit 5.5.1)
git clone -b 5.5.1 --depth 1 https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings
cd rustlings
cargo install --force --path .

If there are installation errors, ensure that your toolchain is up to date. For the latest, run:

rustup update

Then, same as above, run rustlings to get started.

Doing exercises

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

The task is simple. Most exercises contain an error that keeps them from compiling, and it's up to you to fix it! Some exercises are also run as tests, but rustlings handles them all the same. To run the exercises in the recommended order, execute:

rustlings watch

This will try to verify the completion of every exercise in a predetermined order (what we think is best for newcomers). It will also rerun automatically every time you change a file in the exercises/ directory. If you want to only run it once, you can use:

rustlings verify

This will do the same as watch, but it'll quit after running.

In case you want to go by your own order, or want to only verify a single exercise, you can run:

rustlings run myExercise1

Or simply use the following command to run the next unsolved exercise in the course:

rustlings run next

In case you get stuck, you can run the following command to get a hint for your exercise:

rustlings hint myExercise1

You can also get the hint for the next unsolved exercise with the following command:

rustlings hint next

To check your progress, you can run the following command:

rustlings list

Testing yourself

After every couple of sections, there will be a quiz that'll test your knowledge on a bunch of sections at once. These quizzes are found in exercises/quizN.rs.

Enabling rust-analyzer

Run the command rustlings lsp which will generate a rust-project.json at the root of the project, this allows rust-analyzer to parse each exercise.

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, there are two steps. First, you'll need to remove the exercises folder that the install script created for you:

rm -rf rustlings # or your custom folder name, if you chose and or renamed it

Second, run cargo uninstall to remove the rustlings binary:

cargo uninstall rustlings

Now you should be done!

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Development-focused discussion about Rustlings happens in the rustlings stream on the Rust Project Zulip. Feel free to start a new thread there if you have ideas or suggestions!

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to the wonderful people listed in AUTHORS.md 🎉