Rust is a really ambitious programming language that “runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.” Who doesn’t want to try this with a headline like that?

I wanted to use Rust on an offline Linux system, but it seemed like there isn’t a nice guide to install Rust and some popular packages all in one go (like Anaconda, though what I describe here is much more ghetto), so I decided to summarize the procedure to install the Rust toolchain and some popular libraries all in one go on a system with no internet access.

To prepare the files to put onto the targetted unconnected Linux machine, you need a Linux box that is connected to the net to fetch the necessary files and run some commands.

Obtaining the Rust Toolchain

Installing Rust on a normal connected machine is really easy: just use rustup . It’s an amazing tool (I mean, if you’re a new language, it’s probably a good idea to make it extremely easy to install), but it seems to only work when the machine is online.

There are standalone installers available in the Other Rust Installation Methods page.

If you’re targeting Linux like me, you should probably download the x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu .tar.gz bundle and move it over to the target machine. It installs globally provided you have root access, and there doesn’t really seem to be an option to install to one user, which there is an option to do if you use rustup .

Obtaining Packages

The Rust Playground is a simple website that lets you run bits of Rust code and get immediate results all in the browser. A neat thing about the Playground is that it supports the top 100 most popular Cargo packages. The Playground code maintains a Cargo.toml that is automatically updated with the top 100 packages, so we’ll use this to get some packages we might need in our offline setup.

Just having the Cargo.toml file is useless, so we need to turn them into actual bits of code or blobs that we can use in our Rust code. On a connected machine, running cargo build or any other build commands will automatically fetch them from crates.io, so we need to replace this functionality with a local mirror that serves crates.

The following procedure takes a while to complete and is quite fiddly, so I made the final archive file available for download here. Skip to the next section to see how to install this on your target machine.

To create your own local archive, you can use a handy dandy Cargo subcommand called cargo-local-registry that you can install. Using the Cargo.toml file from the Playground, we can turn the declarations into actual .crate files. Install this on your connected machine.

I found the easiest way to get these crates was to make a temporary empty Rust project on your connected machine:

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cargo new playground



Notice the name of the project, because that means we can use the Cargo.toml from the playground without modifying it.

Copy the Cargo.toml from the Playground, and generate Cargo.lock :

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cd playground

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/integer32llc/rust-playground/master/compiler/base/Cargo.toml -O

cargo update



Then run cargo-local-registry :

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cargo local-registry --sync Cargo.lock ../local_registry/



After that’s done, you probably want to make a tar archive of the local registry so you can easily move it over to the target system.

Installing on the Target System

The following steps are to be run on the Target system.

To reiterate, you need to move the Rust standalone installer and the local registry archive you created earlier to the target machine.

Installing the Rust toolchain is super simple as explained earlier. Unarchive and run the install.sh script inside the root directory of the installer.

Next, unzip the local registry in a convenient location. You must then tell Cargo on the target machine to use local registry instead of crates.io, by writing a section on your Cargo config.

The Cargo config can be in any one of these places:

/projects/foo/bar/baz/.cargo/config

/projects/foo/bar/.cargo/config

/projects/foo/.cargo/config

/projects/.cargo/config

/.cargo/config

$HOME/.cargo/config

For the config to take effect for all users, it’s probably best to put it on /.cargo/config , or if you want it to take effect on just your user, on $HOME/.cargo/config .

Write the following in the config file, creating it if it doesn’t exist already:

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[source.offline]

local-registry = "/location/of/local/registry/here/"



[source.crates-io]

replace-with = "offline"



Don’t forget to replace the local-registry field value with the actual location of your local registry.

To test if it actually compiles, use the temporary playground Rust project we made earlier. If you try to cargo build it, it will compile all 100 of those crates, and it’s a good way to test. From my experience, you probably need to install gcc because of the cc crate, the OpenSSL development library because of (to nobody’s surprise) the openssl crate, and cmake and make in addition.

Thank you to the people on the Rust Discord for giving me guidance to get this working.