the_first_project.md

The First Project

To create a Rust project, we use the command below:

cargo new my_project

where my_project is the name of our project.

This command creates a folder my_project. There are two items in folder my_project, Cargo.toml and src. Cargo.toml is a file for package management. src is a folder that contains all our source code files, usually with names end with .rs.

There is a file, main.rs, created in folder src. The file has the default function. We can execute this function by the commands below:

cd my_project
cargo run

cargo run compiles and runs our program. We can run cargo run anywhere in folder my_project. Running the program gives us the following output:

Hello, world!

Sometimes, we only need to compile the program but not actually run it. For example, when we want to make sure that the program has no compile errors. In this case, we can use the command below:

cargo build

Finally, when we are ready to publish our program and need our program to be compiled in the optimal way, we can use the command below:

cargo build --release

We can find the result executables in folder target, which is in folder my_project. If we build the project with --release flag, we can find the executable in folder target/release. Otherwise, we can find it in folder target/debug.

➡️ Next: Explanation Of The First Program

📘 Back: Table of contents