Cargo package structure cheat sheet

[AndreKR]

I made a summary of all the file name conventions that cargo recognizes:

Blue are names of your choosing, black names must be used verbatim.

[ZiCog]

Cool.

I'm wondering how src/lib fits in to all this? I notice you don't have it there.

Sometimes I have had the compiler complaint can't find some file and suggesting I create a src/lib/whatever.rs for it.

On one occasion I got mightily confused when no matter what I did the compiler refused to see my file. Then I discovered that in some experiment I had put mod lib; in a source file. Removing that fixed it.

[AndreKR]

I don't think src/lib has any special meaning.

Here's a likely scenario:

You created a file src/lib/mod.rs. You (not cargo) made the choice to call the directory "lib". As you just said, in your top level crate you wrote mod lib. Then in your src/lib/mod.rs you wrote mod whatever. Then the compiler will say:

error[E0583]: file not found for module `whatever`
 --> src\lib\mod.rs:1:1
  |
1 | mod whatever;
  | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  |
  = help: to create the module `whatever`, create file "src\lib\whatever.rs"

If you did that, it would simply be a module that you can access with use lib::whatever::*.