buildRustCrate should support nix-shell features

Issue description

The following features are currently absent from buildRustCrate which would be excellent for nix-shell:

Shell-only dependencies, i.e.being able to use cargo from within the shell without adding build dependencies
Setting of environment variables
Setting build phases, especially running tests

This issue was brought up in this thread

@P-E-Meunier

Ok, I didn't remember this was an issue, so PLEASE add it to the current documentation: a derivation has phases, documented in https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-stdenv-phases.

Nix-build sets up the environment by downloading all the buildInputs/propagatedBuildInputs, and then runs all the phases, while nix-shell only sets up the environment.

I am not sure how cargo can pick up downloaded crates from environment variables. In buildRustCrate a .cargo/config file is used.

Cargo unifies config by walking up the file tree looking for .cargo/config and ends with $CARGO_HOME/config (where $CARGO_HOME defaults to $HOME/.cargo). The shell environment could specify CARGO_HOME as pointing at a temporary directory that specifies the desired config. The only practical difference here is that a local .cargo/config in a parent directory could potentially override the values specified in the Nix-provided config (though not one in the current directory, as if the current directory already specifies the keys that Nix is adding, then the Nix build would fail as well due to duplicate keys as it appends its configuration onto any existing .cargo/config file).

Currently it seems like nix-shell works with buildRustPackage. Can somebody confirm? Does that solve this issue?

Thank you for your contributions.

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@kolloch

Would this be interesting for crate2nix? https://github.com/kolloch/crate2nix cc @kolloch

@andir

The main question is where the right place for this functionality is. Making progress in nixpkgs is more challenging. @andir is working on shell support in crate2nix: nix-community/crate2nix#135

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

I think this is still relevant.

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

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buildRustCrate should support nix-shell features #37945

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buildRustCrate should support nix-shell features #37945

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vitiral commented on Mar 27, 2018

Mic92 commented on Apr 6, 2018

lilyball commented on May 19, 2019

haslersn commented on Aug 14, 2019

stale commented on Jun 2, 2020

Mic92 commented on Jun 2, 2020

kolloch commented on Jun 2, 2020

stale commented on Nov 29, 2020

Mic92 commented on Nov 29, 2020

stale commented on Jun 3, 2021

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