This guide assumes you have both Rust and cargo. Specifically, cargonauts currently depends on the nightly version of Rust. You need to get the nightly Rust compiler on your machine in order to use cargonauts.

If you don't have Rust yet, I recommend installing it using rustup.rs, which will help you handle having multiple versions of Rust installed at the same time. Once you've installed rustup, you can get the nightly version of Rust with this command:

rustup install nightly

To quickly get started with cargonauts, you should install the cargonauts-cli crate. This is just a tiny app which helps you generate the source code for your app, it isn't involved in running it.

You can install the CLI with cargo:

cargo install cargonauts-cli

This gives you a new command, cargonauts.

Now that we have the CLI, we'll use it to create our application, which we're going to call "echo". The command to create our app is this:

cargonauts new echo

This will create a new Rust application in the echo directory. Move into that directory and make sure that you'll be using the nightly compiler with rustup:

cd ./echo
rustup override set nightly

Now, to make sure that everything is in order, let's build the application with cargo build.

Unfortunately, and despite our best intentions, building all of cargonauts' dependencies for the first time will take several minutes. Feel free to treat yourself to a refreshment, or do something you like to do, while your waiting for all of our dependencies to build.

If you're looking for something to do, feel free to advance to the next section of this book, where we'll explore some of the files that we've created so far. You can read through this section before your app has finished building.

If your app doesn't build correctly, please visit the gitter channel for help.