Rust is a programing language famous for its speed and efficient memory usage. For this reason, Rust has become one of the most popular languages for developing cross-platform applications.
The easiest, most convenient method is to use the brew package manager to handle the Rust packages. Alternative methods include downloading the Rust package from the web and manually setting up the system dependencies, environment variables, and the Rust workspace. Visit the official Rust website for further details on this alternate method.
In this article, we will be focusing on using the most simple and common method: installation using the homebrew package manager.
The homebrew package manager handles all of the dependencies and sets up the Rust environment, which makes our lives easier.
To install homebrew, open up your mac terminal and run the following command:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Installing Rust using the homebrew package manager is pretty straightforward, and you can choose between either of the two following methods, based on your needs.
The easiest way to install Rust is to run the following command:
brew install rust
With that, you now have a working Rust environment on your system. Now you can run the
brew info rust
command to verify your installation.
The above method will not allow you to switch versions. If you decide to keep multiple versions of Rust on your systems and switch between them, you must install Rust using the following commands:
brew install rustup
rustup-init
With homebrew package manager installed, you can easily check the installation status of Rust by running the following command on your mac terminal:
brew info rust
You can run the following command to get the installed version of Rust:
rust --version
Another functionality of homebrew is that it allows the user to switch between different versions of Rust that are available on a system. This can be useful if you plan to check the behavior of your program on multiple systems (new and old).
To switch between versions of Rust in your system, you can run the following command:
brew switch rust <rust version>
In this command, you need to replace the <rust version> with the actual version number of Rust that you want to switch to (assuming it is present on your system).
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