Even if you’re just writing a short one-off script, you can be confident it’s fast, easily testable, and gives helpful output.
Rust’s guarantees
Compile everything down to a single binary—no need for your users to have a runtime or libraries installed.
How to ship Rust code
Handle configuration files across platforms with ease. Rust will deal with namespaces and formats for you.
Start configuring
Generate manual pages for your app automatically. Just package the generated files and you’re done.
Learn how
In addition to talking to humans, Rust has great tools to help you talk to machines.
Communicate with machines
It’s easy to add logging, and even easier to configure it to different targets and with different styles.
Log, trace, comprehend
What if the config file is missing or corrupt? What if the content of that one environment variable is empty? These cases are easy to forget about! But thanks to its approach to error handling and its library design, Rust will point out these “what if” situations before you even run your program.
Rust’s error handling
Rust allows you to be flexible in the way you organize your code. Start with just a single file and, when you need more features, refactor your application with the confidence that you aren’t breaking anything.
Refactoring RustWriting a command-line app is a great way to learn Rust.
use clap::Parser;
/// Read some lines of a file
#[derive(Debug, Parser)]
struct Cli {
/// Input file to read
file: String,
/// Number of lines to read
#[structopt(short = 'n')]
num: usize,
}use std::{error::Error, fs::read_to_string};
fn main() -> Result<(), Box> {
let args = Cli::parse();
read_to_string(&args.file)?
.lines()
.take(args.num)
.for_each(|line| println!("{}", line));
Ok(())
} 
One of the reasons we liked Rust was the crates.io ecosystem. [...] There is a lot of really good already existing infrastructure for building very nice command-line interfaces.
– Armin Ronacher, Rust at Sentry – PolyConf 2017
I have zero regrets with living in this code base. […] This was sort of an added bonus for me: Using Rust to make CLI or console based tools. It is very good at compiling for different target systems.
– Fletcher Nichol, Taking Rust to Production – RustFest Kyiv
