Automated maintenance and dependencies security for Rust projects

Wed, Jun 22, 2022

It's an open secret that most of the time and costs spent on any serious software project are from maintenance. Rust is moving fast, and its ecosystem too, so it's necessary to automate your projects' maintenance.

The good news is that, in my experience, due to its strong typing, Rust project maintenance is easier than in other languages: errors such as API changes will be caught at compile time.

For that, the community has built a few tools which will save you a lot of time to let you keep your projects up to date.

This post is an excerpt from my book Black Hat Rust

Rustup

Update your local toolchain with rustup:

$ rustup self update
$ rustup update

Rust fmt

rustfmt is a code formatter that allows codebases to have a consistent coding style and avoid nitpicking during code reviews.

It can be configured using a .rustfmt.toml file: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustfmt.

You can use it by calling:

$ cargo fmt

In your projects.

Clippy

clippy is a linter for Rust. It will detect code patterns that may lead to errors or are identified by the community as bad style.

It helps your codebase to be consistent and reduce time spent during code reviews discussing tiny details.

It can be installed with:

$ rustup component add clippy

And used with:

$ cargo clippy

Cargo update

$ cargo update

Is a command that will automatically update your dependencies according to the semver declaration in your Cargo.toml.

Cargo outdated

cargo-outdated is a program that helps you to identify your outdated dependencies that can't be automatically updated with cargo update

It can be installed as follows:

$ cargo install -f cargo-outdated

The usage is as simple as running

$ cargo outdated

In your projects.

Cargo audit

Sometimes, you may not be able to always keep your dependencies to the last version and need to use an old version (due to dependency by another of your dependency...) of a crate. As a professional, you still want to be sure that none of your outdated dependencies contains any known vulnerability.

cargo-audit is the tool for the job. It can be installed with:

$ cargo install -f cargo-audit

Like other helpers, it's very simple to use:

$ cargo audit
    Fetching advisory database from `https://github.com/RustSec/advisory-db.git`
      Loaded 317 security advisories (from /usr/local/cargo/advisory-db)
    Updating crates.io index
    Scanning Cargo.lock for vulnerabilities (144 crate dependencies)