Gists are really just git repos with no directory structure. This is something that some Rubyists have taken advantage of in the past to create “Microgems”. Would it be possible to do the same thing in Rust?

I was in the process of messing around with some Rust code. I had created a new crate with cargo and hacked around a bit. Not wanting to lose my changes I’d created a git repository too. We aren’t talking about much code here, just a few dozen lines in a single .rs file. I didn’t really want to create a full GitHub repo just for this small amount of code.

“Wouldn’t it be really nice if I could just put it all in a Gist” I thought.

By convention a Rust crate has a few different directories, src/ for all of the source files, test/ for integration tests and so on; at the top level is the Cargo.toml file containing the package metadata. We can’t use these in a Gist. We need to just stick our source files right next to the Cargo.toml. It turns out that configuring Cargo to understand our wacky new folder structure is actually quite simple. We just need to se the path to our source file in the Cargo.toml

[package]
 
name = "..."
version = "0.0.1"
authors = ["..."]
 
[[bin]]
    name = "example"
    path = "main.rs"

If you’re creating a library rather than an executable you’ll ned to use the [lib] section instead of the [[bin]] array. There’s more information about what you can configure for each target in the cargo docs. You can see the results in action in a simple hand-written lexer I wrote.