Already installed Rust?

Several Linux distributions package Rust, and you may wish to use the packaged toolchain, such as for distribution package development. You may also wish to use a rustup-managed toolchain such as nightly or beta. Normally, rustup will complain that you already have Rust installed in /usr and refuse to install. However, you can install Rust via rustup and have it coexist with your distribution’s packaged Rust.

When you initially install Rust with rustup, pass the -y option to make it ignore the packaged Rust toolchain and install a rustup-managed toolchain into ~/.cargo/bin. Add that directory to your $PATH (or let rustup do it for you by not passing --no-modify-path). Then, to tell rustup about your system toolchain, run:

rustup toolchain link system /usr

You can then use “system” as a rustup toolchain, just like “nightly”. For example, using the toolchain override shorthand, you can run cargo +system build to build with the system toolchain, or cargo +nightly build to build with nightly.

If you do distribution Rust development, you should likely make “system” your default toolchain:

rustup default system