cargo-make VS cargo-xtask

cargo-make aims to be an extensive Rust-written task runner that additionally lets you define workflows to execute your tasks. You can install it using cargo install cargo-make.

You might be interested in cargo-make, which is based on TOML, or Just, which has a syntax that is vaguely inspired by Make but much less weird sigils and more suited to non-file-based tasks.

I would like to rewrite this project in Rust, but I am not so familiar with Cargo as I am with Make. Is it possible to declare these kinds of rules and targets ? Should I use a build script, a custom tool like cargo-make or something else ? What do you think ?

I use just myself, and I personally don't want projects' codebase to decide when something gets cargo installed on my system. For people who feel that's more acceptable, I'll note that cargo-make has first class support for the idea of expressing a task that depends on a cargo plugin:

Thank you for the help, created ticket #787 and #788!

https://github.com/sagiegurari/cargo-make

I ended up using it over just because it felt easier to use cross platform, and toml seemed like a right choice

cargo make is used pretty extensively in Bottlerocket OS

Cargo is a pretty robust build tool on it's own, but for that extra automated workflow oomph, I also use cargo-make

💡 Inspired by matklad/cargo-xtask and based on 🏃‍♂️ Write your Rust project scripts in task.rs from the Rust ecosystem.

Using a cargo-xtask task to generate them as a manual step (inlyne currently does this)

As someone else said just is good for that job, or you could implement an xtask helper for these things and setup a suitable development environment with that: https://github.com/matklad/cargo-xtask/

Well tools like cornucopia, prisma-rust-client, protoc-gen-tonic, they don't generate in build.rs, but instead provide either a cli to be called ahead of time, or provide a library that can be called by your own binary (which should generally follow the xtask pattern)

If I understand, this is a tool for when working on the project itself? Akin to a helper script? You could go the cargo install route as already pointed out but there is also the xtask convention.

For simple cli apps for internal use, such as cargo-xtasks, I prefer pico_args due to its fast compile times.

For developer-oriented stuff, there's tools like xshell and cargo-xtask. For operator tasks that need to run in a deployed environment, it's not usually a big lift to add CLI subcommands to your binary. It's certainly more boilerplate and inertia than doing stuff in a live REPL, though, and sometimes difficult to recommend for truly one-off situations.