Prerequisites for running Rust on Linux

A Linux Machine (Ubuntu 20.04)
Access to Terminal
A user account with Sudo privileges

Update the System Repositories

Before we begin installing Rust on Ubuntu, we need to ensure that all our system repositories are up to date. To do this, we must use the apt package management tool to change our default repositories.

To do so, launch the terminal on your Ubuntu machine and enter the following command.

apt update

Next, we will use the upgrade command in our terminal

sudo apt upgrade

Install Rust on Linux

Despite the many ways to install Rust on Linux, the rustup shell script is the most recommended.

On the official Rust website, this is the recommended way to install Rust on Ubuntu. This is the strategy we shall employ in this lesson. To utilize the rustup installer, type the following command:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Next, you need to select option 1 and the result will be as shown below:

You can also install rust with the official package manager for Ubuntu

sudo apt install rustc

Apt method took longer so, for the purpose of this tutorial, method 1 is the preferred method of installing Rustc. We can also use the command below:

snap install rustup

Whichever method you decide to go with, Rust and its dependencies will be installed. After the installation is complete, use the following command as shown below to check the version of Rust that is installed in your Ubuntu.

rustc --version

Create a Rust Project

You may start working on your first project after installing Rust. You can choose to call your directory anything you want, in our own case we decided to use techdirectarchive and hello_world

mkdir ~/techdirectarchive
cd ~/techdirectarchive
mkdir hello_world
cd hello_world

Make a new file with the extension.rs If your file name contains more than one word, use the underscore hello world.rs instead of helloworld.rs.

sudo vim hello_world.rs

Paste the following code inside the new file.

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Hit escape on your keyboard followed by : and wq to save the file.

Now compile and run the program.

rustc hello_world.rs 
./hello_world

Congratulations. Have fun with your Rust installation.

In this article, we learnt how to install Rust in a Linux System by following the steps above and we also got to also see other available options for installation. Finally, we created a mini project to see rust in action.