Is it possible to publish crates with "path" specified?

1

Run

cargo publish --dry-run

It said:

the `path` specification will be removed from the dependency declaration
2

No, it is not. You can't publish packages on crates.io with wildcard dependencies (*), git dependencies, path dependencies or dependencies from other registries. Read more about it in this section of the cargo book:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/specifying-dependencies.html

4 Likes
3

What you can do is have both a version and a path specified. In local development the path is used, and in publication the path is deleted so that the dependency will be fetched from crates.io too.

3 Likes
4

Yes, good point. Multiple locations are documented in the cargo book here:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/specifying-dependencies.html#multiple-locations

This is very useful for workspaces.

5

Some crates are licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, so I can change their source code or configuration files. If I specify the versions, cargo will download it from crates.io, I must specify the paths to use my modified versions.

6

Have you tried multiple locations?

[dependencies]
# Uses `my-bitflags` when used locally, and uses
# version 1.0 from crates.io when published.
bitflags = { path = "my-bitflags", version = "1.0" }

This will cause your local project (on your computer) to use bitflags from your local directory my-bitflags but you can still publish your package to crates.io. If someone were to download your package, it would be build with the bitflags v1.0 crate published on crates.io.

7

If you intend to publish the crate depending on the modified versions, then these modified versions must be published too. Otherwise, how will the users of your crate get them?

8

Yes. That's precisely the reason to reject path during publishing.

9

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