Portable Rust installation

The recommended Rust installation method is to curl a rustup.sh script and pipe it into sh. The script will then ask for root permissions and install stuff globally. You’ll never see me pipe unknown stuff from the network into sh.

I don’t get that new curl foodotcom/setup | sh trend, do you want to fuck up your OS? Because that’s how you fuck up your OS.

— @iMilnb, March 15, 2015

And even when manually downloading and extracting the binaries, we still need to run a 1000 lines install.sh script doing again stuff as root.

However, it turns out to be trivial to use Rust without installing anything globally, nor running big shell scripts as root.

First, get the binaries according to your system, and the Rust version you want. For me (nightly 64-bit Linux binaries) and extract the archive (I like to put it in ~/opt):

wget https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar xf rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
mv rust-nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu rust

Then, just export the appropriate environment variables (do this from your ~/.profile or equivalent to have it set up automatically). No need to install anything globally!

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/opt/rust/rustc/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=~/opt/rust/rustc/bin:$PATH
export PATH=~/opt/rust/cargo/bin:$PATH