Installing Rust and Cargo on Ubuntu 21.10 using Ansible

Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your development machine if it ever goes down.

Personal philosophy

I try to install everything that I will want to use for more than just a trial inside of my ansible playbook. This way I always get the same setup across my work and home machines, and anytime I might setup a throw away vm.

recommended install

This is how rust recommends that you install it on Ubuntu. First update your system, then run their installer, and finally check that the install was successful.

# system update
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade

# download and run the rust installer
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

# confirm your installation is successful
rustc --version

Ansible Install

The first thing I do in my playbooks is to check if the tool is already installed. Here I chose to look for cargo, you could also look for
rustc.

  - name: check if cargo is installed
    shell: command -v cargo
    register: cargo_exists
    ignore_errors: yes

I first check for an existing install so I can re-run my playbooks
quickly filling in only missing tools. More on this
ansible install conditionally

Next we need to download the installer script and make it executable.

  - name: Download Installer
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    get_url:
      url: https://sh.rustup.rs
      dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
      mode: '0755'
      force: 'yes'
    tags:
      - rust

I chose to download the installer, because I was unable to pass in the
-y flag otherwise, which is required to do unattended installs.

Last we just run the installer given to us by rust with the -y flag so that it will run unattended.

  - name: install rust/cargo
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
    tags:
      - rust

One more thing

Make sure that you source your cargo env, otherwise your shell will not find rustc or cargo. I chose to do this by adding the following line to my ~/.zshrc. You can but it in ~/.bashrc if that is your thing, or just run it in your shell to just get it to work.

[ -f ~/.cargo/env ] && source $HOME/.cargo/env

Full Install Playbook

Here is a fully working install playbook to get you started or to port into your own playbook.

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: true
  become: true
  become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}"

  pre_tasks:
    - name: update repositories
      apt: update_cache=yes
      become_user: root
      changed_when: False
  vars:
    user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}"
  tasks:
  - name: check if cargo is installed
    shell: command -v cargo
    register: cargo_exists
    ignore_errors: yes

  - name: Download Installer
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    get_url:
      url: https://sh.rustup.rs
      dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
      mode: '0755'
      force: 'yes'
    tags:
      - rust

  - name: install rust/cargo
    when: cargo_exists is failed
    shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
    tags:
      - rust

You can save this as a local.yml and run the following in your shell to run the playbook on your local machine.

ansible-playbook local.yml --ask-become-pass

note: --ask-become-pass is required for the system update step.
This will ask for your password as soon as ansible starts.

I also have a very similar article on hwo I ansible install fonts