Dependencies - The Cargo Book

## Dependencies

crates.io is the Rust community's central package registry that serves as a location to discover and download packages. `cargo` is configured to use it by default to find requested packages.

To depend on a library hosted on crates.io, add it to your `Cargo.toml`.

### Adding a dependency

If your `Cargo.toml` doesn't already have a `[dependencies]` section, add that, then list the crate name and version that you would like to use. This example adds a dependency of the `time` crate:

    [dependencies]
    time = "0.1.12"

The version string is a semver version requirement. The specifying dependencies docs have more information about the options you have here.

If we also wanted to add a dependency on the `regex` crate, we would not need to add `[dependencies]` for each crate listed. Here's what your whole `Cargo.toml` file would look like with dependencies on the `time` and `regex` crates:

    [package]
    name = "hello_world"
    version = "0.1.0"
    authors = ["Your Name <you@example.com>"]

    [dependencies]
    time = "0.1.12"
    regex = "0.1.41"

Re-run `cargo build`, and Cargo will fetch the new dependencies and all of their dependencies, compile them all, and update the `Cargo.lock`:

    $ cargo build
          Updating crates.io index
       Downloading memchr v0.1.5
       Downloading libc v0.1.10
       Downloading regex-syntax v0.2.1
       Downloading memchr v0.1.5
       Downloading aho-corasick v0.3.0
       Downloading regex v0.1.41
         Compiling memchr v0.1.5
         Compiling libc v0.1.10
         Compiling regex-syntax v0.2.1
         Compiling memchr v0.1.5
         Compiling aho-corasick v0.3.0
         Compiling regex v0.1.41
         Compiling hello_world v0.1.0 (file:///path/to/project/hello_world)

Our `Cargo.lock` contains the exact information about which revision of all of these dependencies we used.

Now, if `regex` gets updated, we will still build with the same revision until we choose to `cargo update`.

You can now use the `regex` library using `extern crate` in `main.rs`.

    extern crate regex;

    use regex::Regex;

    fn main() {
        let re = Regex::new(r"^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$").unwrap();
        println!("Did our date match? {}", re.is_match("2014-01-01"));
    }

Running it will show:

    $ cargo run
       Running `target/hello_world`
    Did our date match? true