Continuous Integration

Getting Started

A basic CI will build and test your projects:

GitHub Actions

To test your package on GitHub Actions, here is a sample .github/workflows/ci.yml file:

name: Cargo Build & Test

on:
  push:
  pull_request:

env: 
  CARGO_TERM_COLOR: always

jobs:
  build_and_test:
    name: Rust project - latest
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        toolchain:
          - stable
          - beta
          - nightly
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: rustup update ${{ matrix.toolchain }} && rustup default ${{ matrix.toolchain }}
      - run: cargo build --verbose
      - run: cargo test --verbose

This will test all three release channels (note a failure in any toolchain version will fail the entire job). You can also click "Actions" > "new workflow" in the GitHub UI and select Rust to add the default configuration to your repo. See GitHub Actions documentation for more information.

GitLab CI

To test your package on GitLab CI, here is a sample .gitlab-ci.yml file:

stages:
  - build

rust-latest:
  stage: build
  image: rust:latest
  script:
    - cargo build --verbose
    - cargo test --verbose

rust-nightly:
  stage: build
  image: rustlang/rust:nightly
  script:
    - cargo build --verbose
    - cargo test --verbose
  allow_failure: true

This will test on the stable channel and nightly channel, but any breakage in nightly will not fail your overall build. Please see the GitLab CI documentation for more information.

builds.sr.ht

To test your package on sr.ht, here is a sample .build.yml file. Be sure to change <your repo> and <your project> to the repo to clone and the directory where it was cloned.

image: archlinux
packages:
  - rustup
sources:
  - <your repo>
tasks:
  - setup: |
      rustup toolchain install nightly stable
      cd <your project>/
      rustup run stable cargo fetch
  - stable: |
      rustup default stable
      cd <your project>/
      cargo build --verbose
      cargo test --verbose
  - nightly: |
      rustup default nightly
      cd <your project>/
      cargo build --verbose ||:
      cargo test --verbose  ||:
  - docs: |
      cd <your project>/
      rustup run stable cargo doc --no-deps
      rustup run nightly cargo doc --no-deps ||:

This will test and build documentation on the stable channel and nightly channel, but any breakage in nightly will not fail your overall build. Please see the builds.sr.ht documentation for more information.

Verifying Latest Dependencies

When specifying dependencies in Cargo.toml, they generally match a range of versions. Exhaustively testing all version combination would be unwieldy. Verifying the latest versions would at least test for users who run cargo add or cargo install.

When testing the latest versions some considerations are:

Minimizing external factors affecting local development or CI
Rate of new dependencies being published
Level of risk a project is willing to accept
CI costs, including indirect costs like if a CI service has a maximum for parallel runners, causing new jobs to be serialized when at the maximum.

Some potential solutions include:

Not checking in the Cargo.lock
- Depending on PR velocity, many versions may go untested
- This comes at the cost of determinism
Have a CI job verify the latest dependencies but mark it to “continue on failure”
- Depending on the CI service, failures might not be obvious
- Depending on PR velocity, may use more resources than necessary
Have a scheduled CI job to verify latest dependencies
- A hosted CI service may disable scheduled jobs for repositories that haven’t been touched in a while, affecting passively maintained packages
- Depending on the CI service, notifications might not be routed to people who can act on the failure
- If not balanced with dependency publish rate, may not test enough versions or may do redundant testing
Regularly update dependencies through PRs, like with Dependabot or RenovateBot
- Can isolate dependencies to their own PR or roll them up into a single PR
- Only uses the resources necessary
- Can configure the frequency to balance CI resources and coverage of dependency versions

An example CI job to verify latest dependencies, using GitHub Actions:

jobs:
  latest_deps:
    name: Latest Dependencies
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    continue-on-error: true
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: rustup update stable && rustup default stable
      - run: cargo update --verbose
      - run: cargo build --verbose
      - run: cargo test --verbose

For projects with higher risks of per-platform or per-Rust version failures, more combinations may want to be tested.

Verifying `rust-version`

When publishing packages that specify rust-version, it is important to verify the correctness of that field.

Some third-party tools that can help with this include:

An example of one way to do this, using GitHub Actions:

jobs:
  msrv:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - uses: taiki-e/install-action@cargo-hack
    - run: cargo hack check --rust-version --workspace --all-targets --ignore-private

This tries to balance thoroughness with turnaround time:

A single platform is used as most projects are platform-agnostic, trusting platform-specific dependencies to verify their behavior.
cargo check is used as most issues contributors will run into are API availability and not behavior.
Unpublished packages are skipped as this assumes only consumers of the verified project, through a registry, will care about rust-version.

The Cargo Book