Recently, we ran a survey to find out how Rustaceans evaluate crates on crates.io in order to inform an RFC on the default order of crates within a category or keyword. Regardless of what happens with that RFC, the survey responses contained a lot of information that crate authors can use to help people who are evaluating crates. The following are some low-effort actions crate authors can take to make it more likely that users will consider their crate. Number 4 will shock you!!!!!!!

This list assumes that you want other people to use your crate. If that’s why you wrote and released it, keep reading! If you wrote a crate as an experiment, or if you’ve chosen to no longer maintain a crate you’ve published, that’s totally fine too! You might actually want to do the opposite of these recommendations if you want to discourage people from using your crate in most circumstances.

Part of what’s exciting to me is the amount of opportunity available in the Rust ecosystem to help each other by writing and releasing libraries. Even small crates can provide really useful functionality for everyone to use, provided that potential users are able to find it, figure out how to use it, and determine if it’s appropriate for their use cases.

1. Documentation, documentation, documentation

By far, the most mentioned attribute of a crate that crate users were looking for was good documentation. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every public item has docs, but the top-level items in your public API should have a description of what you would use them for, and ideally also have an example. Other kinds of documentation, such as tutorials, were also highly valued and made it more likely that a crate user would try out your crate. Make sure links to those are easily findable, such as near the top of your README!

So add API docs to your crate, with examples where appropriate. Publish a version on crates.io and Docs.rs will host the rendered docs for you! Until crates.io links to Docs.rs automatically, specify your crate’s Docs.rs URL as the documentation link in Cargo.toml to make it easy for potential users to find your crate.

2. Add an example to top-level module docs and the README

Along with detailed API documentation, people evaluating crates were looking for something that would give them a sense of what it would be like to use this crate. They mentioned looking for an end-to-end example with prose or comments explaining what the code was doing.

Currently, there’s not a consensus on where the majority of the introductory documentation should go: in the README that’s rendered on the repository, or in the crate’s top-level module docs so that it shows up on the front page of the documentation? Given that crates.io doesn’t render the README yet, and that not all crates have documentation, survey respondents mentioned checking in both places. For that reason, until there’s a better solution, I’d recommend duplicating the example and explanation in both these locations.

3. Set all applicable fields in Cargo.toml

You’re required to put some content in the description , license , and authors fields before publishing on crates.io, but it’s worth thinking about the content of those fields and whether adding some optional metadata would help people find and evaluate your crate.

Without looking, do you know where your crate’s description is shown on crates.io? It’s on your crate’s page, and it’s also used in lists of crates such as search results or within a keyword. That makes the description field a great place to pitch why your crate is useful and what distinguishes it from other crates.

Definitely link to your documentation in the documentation link field, as discussed above. Consider not adding a homepage link unless you have a homepage that’s different than your repository and documentation links– a few survey respondents expressed frustration at looking through all the links and hoping for an informative homepage but finding out it’s the same as another page.

If you have a README file, specify the filename in the readme field. If you do, crates.io will index the text in the README file so that searches on crates.io can use that info, which will make your crate easier to find if people search for it using words that only appear in your README. Additionally, Docs.rs uses the readme field to render the README file specified on its pages, and crates.io might do the same in the future.

Also consider adding up to 5 keywords, which are indexed for searching as well. Keywords will likely be made more visible for browsing someday too! Check out categories when those are released; the list of categories will be managed via pull request to crates.io, and the categories won’t be used for search. They’re designed solely to organize crates by their purpose, whereas keywords can be used to indicate any attribute of a crate, and crate authors can specify any keyword they want.

4. Release a 1.0 version

Many crate users are looking for a signal of production readiness and stability that a version >= 1.0 indicates. If you’re using your own crate in production, and if you don’t have any planned rearranging of your public API, why not release a 1.0 version? Besides, even if you do decide the public API should be changed, you can release a new major version. That’s what semver is for!

On the other hand, if you don’t want people to use your crate in production for whatever reason, then leaving the version number as something less than 1.0 is a great way to signal that.

5. Write a blog post about it

People might not need your crate right now, but they might in the future. If they’ve heard of your crate before when they do find themselves in a situation your crate is useful, they’ll either go straight to your crate or recognize it in a list of crates and be more likely to take another look.

Link to your post in the users forum, the Rust subreddit, and on twitter with the #rustlang hashtag to tell everyone about it. Self promotion isn’t a bad thing!

As a bonus, you can link to the blog post about your crate from your README as extra documentation!

6. Set up TravisCI and Appveyor

TravisCI and Appveyor are great ways to automatically run your tests every time you push new code. It’s important to set up both: TravisCI can run your tests on Linux and macOS, while Appveyor can run them on Windows. If your crate works on all platforms, show that off! Add the badges provided by these services to your README to make it easy for potential users to know that you have tests, that they’re passing, and on what platforms the tests are passing.