crate2nix VS cargo2nix

Compare crate2nix vs cargo2nix and see what are their differences.

crate2nix

rebuild only changed crates in CI with crate2nix and nix (by nix-community)

cargo2nix

Granular caching, development shell, Nix & Rust integration (by cargo2nix)
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crate2nix cargo2nix
10 12
311 310
3.2% 9.0%
9.4 7.0
9 days ago 7 days ago
Nix Nix
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

crate2nix

Posts with mentions or reviews of crate2nix. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-02.
  • Transitioning to Rust as a company
    8 projects | /r/rust | 2 Jun 2023
  • Nix shell related questions (for rust)
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 24 Dec 2022
    If you want to iterate with nix instead of cargo, crate2nix and cargo2nix provides more caching and more fine control over your dependencies. I haven't used these two so you would have to decide for yourself. You may also want to try out nocargo for something more experimental.
  • Introducing Crane: Composable and Cacheable Builds with Cargo and Nix
    3 projects | /r/rust | 8 May 2022
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Jan 2022
    I'm yet to try it out, but from the blog post, the README and the source it appears that Crane builds all dependencies in one derivation (separately from the main crate). This means that if a dependency gets added, removed or changed, all dependencies of a crate will be rebuilt. This is in contrast with https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix, which does build every dependency in a separate package, thus you don't need to rebuild other dependencies if you only change a small part of the tree.
  • Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Apr 2022
    Yes, you will have to package it if it's not already in nixpkgs.

    The good news is once you learn how, it's basically trivial with crate2nix[0], which can autogenerate nix derivations from rust crates

    [0] https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix

  • How do you install packages not in Nixpkgs?
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Apr 2021
    As for your two applications, they're both written in Rust, and I like https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix as a way to package Rust crates with Nix. BTW, wezterm is already in nixpkgs!
  • Nix-ifying a Rust project
    12 projects | /r/rust | 7 Apr 2021
    I like the way crate2nix works. I have made a flake template for it here. Sometimes it requires a couple of overrides to fix some misbehaving crates (see https://github.com/balsoft/simple-osd-daemons/blob/master/flake.nix#L29 for an example of such overrides), but otherwise it's fantastic. It doesn't require any hash nonsense, it downloads and builds all the crates separately (unlike naersk or other solutions) so you get all the benefits of Nix (reproducibility and proper caching).
  • How to do a full, reproducible archive of a Rust project?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jan 2021
    Crate2nix might help: https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix

cargo2nix

Posts with mentions or reviews of cargo2nix. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-02.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing crate2nix and cargo2nix you can also consider the following projects:

naersk - Build Rust projects in Nix - no configuration, no code generation, no IFD, sandbox friendly. [maintainer=@AxelSilverdew]

rust-nix-template - Rust project template with Nix (Flakes) and VSCode support

rust-overlay - Pure and reproducible nix overlay of binary distributed rust toolchains

Cargo - The Rust package manager

watt - Runtime for executing procedural macros as WebAssembly

crates.io-index - Registry index for crates.io

nix-templates - Nix Flake templates for various languages

cap-std - Capability-oriented version of the Rust standard library