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Building My First Command Line Interface (CLI) with Rust
Update: I took some of my learnings from this write-up and started a more formal tutorial for building CLI notes app with Rust.
After telling myself over and over that today is the day I start learning rust. I finally successfully built a (very small) cli for engram.
This post will cover some of the things I learned along the way. I mostly from a TypeScript/Node background and will make comparisons between the two where applicable.
Inventing Some Requirements
I have found that having a tangible end goal increases my odds of project completion by nearly 100%. In this case, the goal is to create a command line program that simply POSTs requests to my personal notes application engram.
This is not just a learning or for fun project as I recently realized that the command line is a great place for the input of quick notes. When I’m working, I sometimes find myself investigating something in the terminal and realize that I have a thought that I’d like to follow up on later, or a I’d like to store a command I just ran so I can remember what I did later on.
Getting Started
Install rust with the command below found from their Getting started page
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | shcargo new project-name creates a new folder called project-name with the bare minimum configuration for a rust project
Cargo.toml
This is essentially the rust equivalent of a package.json file. Lists some metadata about the project and eventually allows you to specify any dependencies to be managed by the cargo package manager.
[package]
name = "rust-new-project"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"# See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html[dependencies]
main.rs
Who doesn’t love a good Hello, world! application?
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}
