How to Update All Installed Rust Packages

Rust is not only known for its memory safety, but also for being (almost) on par with C, speed-wise.

In the last couple of years quite some interesting tools were created, which may replace common Linux command line tools, e.g. bat instead of cat, ripgrep instead of grep, …

I installed a handful of them via cargo, Rust’s package manager.

I can list all packages with cargo install --list …

❯ cargo install --list
bat v0.16.0:
    bat
exa v0.9.0:
    exa
fd-find v7.4.0:
    fd
lok v0.1.1:
    lok
starship v0.46.0:
    starship

But I could not figure out how to update them :-/

For cargo update you need the source and a Cargo.toml file…

discord to the rescue

As I wanted to update starship, a super awesome prompt for any shell, I asked on their discord channel and got a super quick answer:

cargo install starship

So, update and install commands are the same… unexpected but works out.

No more head scratching whether it is update or upgrade :-)