R.I.M (Rust Installation Manager)

An interactive program to install & manage Rust toolchain and third-party tools, supports graphical user interface (GUI) and a basic commandline interface (CLI).

Demo

GUI

CLI

How does it work?

Fundamental

This program takes one configuration file toolset-manifest, loads a list of tools from it, then takes advantage of rustup to install Rust toolchain, and uses various method to install different tools (*supporting vscode, MSVC buildtools, MinGW etc, conditions and limitations applied, the details are in the Support section).

After installation, users will have a toolkit, which is a combination of Rust toolchain and (maybe) a collection of tools if user choose to install it. The toolkit can be upgraded/downgraded as well. Which requires another configuration file, called distribution-manifest, this is typically stored in a server, telling the program what toolkit is available to be installed.

Installer and Manager

The functions of this program are splitted into two parts: installer and manager, similar to rustup's rustup-init and rustup.

• installer does the setup work, which initializes the local environment, that includes:
  • creating the installation root
  • setup CARGO_HOME, RUSTUP_HOME, RUSTUP_DIST_SERVER, RUSTUP_UPDATE_ROOT environment variables automatically. (Note if you already have these configured, those might get overrided).
    After env setup, it will guide you through installing Rust toolkit.
• manager, well... it manages stuffs, such as updating and uninstalling toolkit. (components managing is on the way)

Unlike rustup, this program can be used to manage additional set of tools instead of the Rust toolchain. Additionally, this program installs rustup by default, so you can continue using rustup with no problems.

Build

Prerequisite

To build the GUI version, you'll need NodeJs and pnpm installed. You also need to install the tauri-cli (v1) binary, which you can install by:

• run cargo install tauri-cli --version '^1'
• download the built binary from their github release, then extract and put it into your <CARGO_HOME>/.cargo/bin folder

Note: tauri-cli v2 does not work, it is incompatible with tauri v1 project structure, which this program uses.

Release

It is recommanded to use cargo dev dist command for:

• GUI release: cargo dev dist --gui
• CLI release: cargo dev dist --cli
• Both above: cargo dev dist

The built artifacts will be stored inside of ./dist/<TARGET>/.

dev release works by building the release binary then rename it with the vendor_en field in locales/en.json. Then collect the local packages under resources/packages folder, which can be gathered from Web using *cargo dev vendor, then use the packages to create an offline installer.

*(check rim-dev's readme for more details).

But if you just want to try the app or you only need the , just use:

• cargo build --release to build the CLI version (binary name: rim-cli)
• cargo tauri build -b none to build the GUI version (binary name: rim-gui)

Usage

Only CLI mode is listed, for GUI usages, checkout this page for details.

Currently, GUI mode only supports Chinese, the English support and its usage doc will be available soon.

Installer mode (CLI)

Usage: rim-cli [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -l, --lang <LANG>             Specify another language to display [possible values: cn, en]
      --prefix <PATH>           Set another path to install Rust
      --manifest <PATH or URL>  Specify a path or url of manifest file that contains package source and various configurations
  -h, --help                    Print help
  -V, --version                 Print version

Examples

1. Set a default directory for installation:

   ./rim-cli --prefix path/to/dir

2. Install by loading a custom manifest (template: toolset_manifest.toml):

   ./rim-cli --manifest path/to/your/toolset-manifest.toml

Manager mode (CLI)

Manager mode can be activated by:

1. Renaming the binary to one that contains manager, such as manager-cli
2. Having a MODE environment variable set to manager before running the program, such as running export MODE='manager' in Unix systems.

NOTE: Manager will be automatically deployed after installation, and must be run inside of the installation directory to avoid crash

Usage: MODE='manager' rim-cli.exe [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  update     Update toolkit and/or this installation manager
  uninstall  Uninstall individual components or everything
  try-it     A subcommand to create a new Rust project template and let you start coding with it
  help       Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -l, --lang <LANG>  Specify another language to display [possible values: cn, en]
  -h, --help         Print help
  -V, --version      Print version

Examples

1. uninstall all:

./manager uninstall

2. update self and toolkit:

./manager update

3. update toolkit only:

./manager update --toolkit-only

1. Export a pre-configured example project:

./manager try-it -p /path/to/create/project

Support

This program support installing packages in various format, that you may put into a toolset-manifest and pass an --manifest path/to/your/ when executing the CLI app to have an option to install them.

Currently, the following package formats are supported:

1. Binaries - (with extension .exe on Windows, and no extension on Linux)
2. VS-Code plugins - (.vsix files)
3. *Compressed files - (with extension .gz, .xz, .7z, .zip)

For compressed files, the program will first try to decompress it into a temporary path, then identify the structures within, which could boil down to this two kinds:

1. Directory with bin/ folder
2. Plain directory

Both will be placed under <InstallationRoot>/tools folder, but if the directory has a bin/ folder, its path will be added to user's PATH variable additionally.

Known problems

1. There's a bug related to the WebKitGTK on some linux distro, which causing the GUI program showing blank upon starting. This issue can be bypassed after setting the environment variable WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE to 1:

   export WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1