Should end user utilities/applications be registered on crates.io?

Question

Is it acceptable to register generally useful (utilities / applications) on crates.io?

The FAQ doesn't address this and from browsing, there are examples of end-user applications (mostly command line tools).

Or is crates.io? meant only for libraries?

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I'm asking this because the documentation hints at library use, semantic versioning for API's etc. but doesn't reference the case for packaging applications explicitly.

Answer 1

Yes, because you can use cargo install to install and manage those applications system-wide. If this use were discouraged, I would suspect that command to not exist at all, or at least have a very limited applicability.

Snippet from cargo install --help:

Usage:

 cargo install [options] [<crate>]
 cargo install [options] --list

[...]

This command manages Cargo's local set of installed binary crates. Only packages which have [[bin]] targets can be installed, and all binaries are installed into the installation root's bin folder. The installation root is determined, in order of precedence, by --root, $CARGO_INSTALL_ROOT, the install.root configuration key, and finally the home directory (which is either $CARGO_HOME if set or $HOME/.cargo by default).

There are multiple sources from which a crate can be installed. The default location is crates.io but the --git and --path flags can change this source. If the source contains more than one package (such as crates.io or a git repository with multiple crates) the <crate> argument is required to indicate which crate should be installed.

Answer 2

This should not be the primary reason to publish an application to crates.io, but I'm listing it here because it's still a good reason. :)

The Rust team will occasionally use a tool called crater to check for regressions on all crates published on crates.io, usually before merging a pull request that has uncertain consequences. If you wrote some code that happens to compile today but would stop compiling¹ due to a bug fix in the compiler, then they may even submit a pull request to your project that fixes your code!

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¹ Usually, when such breaking changes occur, there's at least one prior release in which a warning will be reported before the warning is turned into an error.