On small projects, it might not seem like using cargo has any advantage over just using rustc, but it is useful to have the same workflow and tooling for all your Rust projects. This makes it really easy to know how to manage dependencies, run the linter and formatter, build and run your project.
I try to manange all my other projects in other languages using a justfile so I don’t have to remember whether I used pip or poetry, npm or yarn or even what language(s) I used, I always have a command just dev to run a dev server. Having this built into the language is really nice!
cargo also provides the cargo doc command, to build HTML docs of your code and its dependencies.
Use cargo add to add dependencies, rather than typing them into your cargo.toml file. When you add a package like this, cargo installs it and tells you what features are installed and availablt. If you want to add a feature for that crate, use the -F flag, like cargo add tokio -F macros
Sources
- The Rust Book, chapter 1.3
- The Cargo Book command reference
- Introduction to Axum video covers
cargo addand some tips for finding and assessing packages.