Cargo Package Registry

Publish Cargo packages for your user or organization.

Requirements

To work with the Cargo package registry, you need Rust and Cargo.

Cargo stores information about the available packages in a package index stored in a git repository. This repository is needed to work with the registry. The following section describes how to create it.

Index Repository

Cargo stores information about the available packages in a package index stored in a git repository. In Forgejo this repository has the special name _cargo-index. After a package was uploaded, its metadata is automatically written to the index. The content of this repository should not be manually modified.

The user or organization package settings page allows to create the index repository along with the configuration file. If needed this action will rewrite the configuration file. This can be useful if for example the Forgejo instance domain was changed.

If the case arises where the packages stored in Forgejo and the information in the index repository are out of sync, the settings page allows to rebuild the index repository. This action iterates all packages in the registry and writes their information to the index. If there are lot of packages this process may take some time.

Configuring the package registry

To register the package registry the Cargo configuration must be updated. Add the following text to the configuration file located in the current users home directory (for example ~/.cargo/config.toml):

[registry]
default = "forgejo"

[registries.forgejo]
index = "sparse+https://forgejo.example.com/api/packages/{owner}/cargo/" # Sparse index
# index = "https://forgejo.example.com/{owner}/_cargo-index.git" # Git

# [net]
# git-fetch-with-cli = true

Parameter	Description
owner	The owner of the package.

Credentials

If the registry is private or you want to publish new packages, you must use your credentials to access it.

The Cargo registry requires an API token with the “write:packages” permission. To obtain a token useable by Cargo, prepend the string “Bearer ” to your API token.

To store the token in your configuration, add the credentials section to the credentials file located in the current users home directory (for example ~/.cargo/credentials.toml):

[registries.forgejo]
token = "Bearer {token}"

Parameter	Description
token	Your personal access token

Git vs Sparse

Currently, cargo supports two ways for fetching crates in a registry: Git index & sparse index. Sparse index is the newest method and offers better performance when updating crates compared to git. Since Rust 1.68, sparse is the default method for crates.io.

Publish a package

Publish a package by obtaining an API token and running the following command in your project:

cargo publish

You cannot publish a package if a package of the same name and version already exists. You must delete the existing package first.

Install a package

To install a package from the package registry, execute the following command:

cargo add {package_name}

Parameter	Description
package_name	The package name.

Supported commands

cargo publish
cargo add
cargo install
cargo yank
cargo unyank
cargo search