Configuring `cargo check` targets

tools and infrastructure cargo
1

Heya! I have now run several times into the situation where I run cargo check and have everything checks fine, only to have cargo test then fail to compile because I forgot to adjust the tests.

This is in theory easy to fix, cargo test --tests or cargo test --all-targets would make sure those are also checked. But this is longer to type, and easy to forget. I could of course make an alias in my shell, write my own shellscript or any other external solution. But I am interested in the possibility of selecting which targets to check via configuration of cargo check?

I did not find anything that points towards this being possible right now, so my question would be, is this something that had been discussed? I tried looking but didn't find anything (cargo, check and configuration are not very low entropy words).

I could see this work mostly with an environment variable: CARGO_CHECK_TARGETS which takes similar values as the CLI: CARGO_CHECK_TARGETS=tests,bench=foo*, etc...

I would then set this as part of my dev environment and could share it with my colleagues for example. (How I would do that is out of scope here of course)

2

You can define Cargo aliases in .cargo/config.toml (which you can have in your project root and commit to VCS). Doesn’t help if you forget to use it rather than vanilla check, or if a colleague doesn’t know about the alias, but at least something like cargo ck is really fast to type.

3

I think it's worthwhile to have cargo check do the most useful normal thing.

4

I'm not sure whether you're arguing that cargo check should by default do some globally unique useful normal thing, or whether it should be customizable to do a project- or coder-specific useful normal thing? If the former, I claim there is no such thing, and if the latter, I don't disagree; I just meant to note that cargo aliases provide a partial solution (or "workaround") that works right now.

5

Aliases would only be a partial solution, but thanks for the reminder they exist!

I know that I won't get out of the habit writing cargo check and wouldn't want to go away from that.