Basic usage

Keeping Rust up to date

Rust is distributed on three different release channels: stable, beta, and nightly. rustup uses the stable channel by default, which represents the latest release of Rust. Stable publishes new releases every six weeks.

When a new version of Rust is released, simply type rustup update to update:

$ rustup update
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable'
info: downloading component 'rustc'
info: downloading component 'rust-std'
info: downloading component 'rust-docs'
info: downloading component 'cargo'
info: installing component 'rustc'
info: installing component 'rust-std'
info: installing component 'rust-docs'
info: installing component 'cargo'
info: checking for self-update
info: downloading self-update

  stable updated: rustc 1.7.0 (a5d1e7a59 2016-02-29)

Keeping rustup up to date

If your rustup was built with the no-self-update feature, it can not update itself. This is not the default, and only versions of rustup built with --no-default-features, or obtained from a third-party distributor who has disabled it (such as NixOS).

Otherwise Rustup can update itself. It is possible to control Rustup’s automatic self update mechanism with the auto-self-update configuration variable. This setting supports three values: enable and disable and check-only.

  • disable will ensure that no automatic self updating actions are taken.
  • enable will mean that rustup update and similar commands will also check for, and install, any update to Rustup.
  • check-only will cause any automatic self update to check and report on any updates, but not to automatically install them.

Whether auto-self-update is enable or not, you can request that Rustup update itself to the latest version of rustup by running rustup self update. This will not download new toolchains:

$ rustup self update
info: checking for self-update
info: downloading self-update

Disabling self updates on a per-invocation basis

Self updates can also be suppressed on individual invocations of rustup by passing the argument --no-self-update when running rustup update or rustup toolchain install.

Help system

The rustup command-line has a built-in help system that provides more information about each command. Run rustup help for an overview. Detailed help for each subcommand is also available. For example, run rustup toolchain install --help for specifics on installing toolchains.