rustup
automatically determines which toolchain to use when one of the
installed commands like rustc
is executed. There are several ways to control
and override which toolchain is used:
- A toolchain override shorthand used on the command-line, such as
cargo +beta
. - The
RUSTUP_TOOLCHAIN
environment variable. - A directory override, set with the
rustup override
command. - The
rustup-toolchain
file. - The default toolchain.
The toolchain is chosen in the order listed above, using the first one that is
specified. There is one exception though: directory overrides and the
rust-toolchain
file are also preferred by their proximity to the current
directory. That is, these two override methods are discovered by walking up
the directory tree toward the filesystem root, and a rust-toolchain
file
that is closer to the current directory will be preferred over a directory
override that is further away.
To verify which toolchain is active use rustup show
.
The rustup
toolchain proxies can be instructed directly to use a specific
toolchain, a convenience for developers who often test different toolchains.
If the first argument to cargo
, rustc
or other tools in the toolchain
begins with +
, it will be interpreted as a rustup
toolchain name, and that
toolchain will be preferred, as in
cargo +beta test
Directories can be assigned their own Rust toolchain with rustup override
.
When a directory has an override then any time rustc
or cargo
is run
inside that directory, or one of its child directories, the override toolchain
will be invoked.
To use to a specific nightly for a directory:
rustup override set nightly-2014-12-18
Or a specific stable release:
rustup override set 1.0.0
To see the active toolchain use rustup show
. To remove the override and use
the default toolchain again, rustup override unset
.
The per-directory overrides are stored in a configuration file in rustup
's
home directory.
Some projects find themselves 'pinned' to a specific release of Rust and want this information reflected in their source repository. This is most often the case for nightly-only software that pins to a revision from the release archives.
In these cases the toolchain can be named in the project's directory in a file
called rust-toolchain
, the content of which is either the name of a single
rustup
toolchain, or a TOML file with the following layout:
[toolchain]
channel = "nightly-2020-07-10"
components = [ "rustfmt", "rustc-dev" ]
targets = [ "wasm32-unknown-unknown", "thumbv2-none-eabi" ]
If the TOML format is used, the [toolchain]
section is mandatory, and at
least one property must be specified.
The rust-toolchain
file is suitable to check in to source control. This file
has to be encoded in US-ASCII (if you are on Windows, check the encoding and
that it does not starts with a BOM).
The toolchains named in this file have a more restricted form than rustup
toolchains generally, and may only contain the names of the three release
channels, 'stable', 'beta', 'nightly', Rust version numbers, like '1.0.0', and
optionally an archive date, like 'nightly-2017-01-01'. They may not name
custom toolchains, nor host-specific toolchains.
If no other overrides are set, the global default toolchain will be used. This
default can be chosen when rustup
is installed. The rustup default
command can be used to set and query the current default. Run rustup default
without any arguments to print the current default. Specify a toolchain as an
argument to change the default:
rustup default nightly-2020-07-27