I didn't see one so I made one - Rust Windows Installer

tools and infrastructure
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I don't know where this would go or where someone would want me to put it. I realized that there isn't an easy installer/executable installer for rust. So I made one using the standard library. If you like it then this will probably take forever to get the edge case bugs out of, but it should make installing rust on windows machines a lot easier

Right now it #worksonmymachine so if you guys have issues with getting it to work on yours then the information would be helpful so that I can add modifications and updates. This should work for all windows 10/11 machines

6 Likes
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modified post to make it more easily understandable from just the title

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And now I feel dumb because I realize that my vscode blocked my save to main.rs from updating the file so for the last 24 hours it's just said hello world. It's fixed lol the actual code is there for other people to review

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Sounds interesting. Is your goal to be something like the NullSoft (NSIS) Installer? Or is it to be something more along the lines of a tool to create MSI's etc?

I probably should've read the linked repo first. I see this is something to install the Rust Toolchain and all the necessary dependencies on Windows.

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Yeah I wanted there to be a single executable file that will install rust for you like they do for python or other languages. The native installation requires you to install visual studio so that you can get the native installs of gcc/cmake, but I'll get to that later lol. That requires understanding anything about the rust windows api

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Made a github action that releases when pushed to main. So now there's a release that you can find on the side and it looks proper fancy lol

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Does this support "user installation" i.e. without administration rights?

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It doesn't right now. I'm going to eventually add that once I figure out how to do it, but right now you can see at line 137 that if it doesn't have admin and it gets blocked then you'll need to rerun as admin "PowerShell execution policy blocks downloads. Please run as administrator or enable PowerShell scripts" Though I was able to get it to work on a fresh install of windows without admin, but your mileage may vary. From what I can tell once you get past the Msys install it doesn't complain at all. So hopefully that is true for everyone forever.... (it won't be, but I can hope)

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So if there's things that you're having issues with or you want me to add then let me know by adding it as an issue on the repo. I'll probably complete the issue that weekend, or if you make the issue on the weekend, that day (hopefully)