Package ID Specifications - The Cargo Book

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# Package ID Specifications

Subcommands of Cargo frequently need to refer to a particular package within a dependency graph for various operations like updating, cleaning, building, etc. To solve this problem, Cargo supports Package ID Specifications. A specification is a string which is used to uniquely refer to one package within a graph of packages.

The specification may be fully qualified, such as `registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index#regex@1.4.3` or it may be abbreviated, such as `regex`. The abbreviated form may be used as long as it uniquely identifies a single package in the dependency graph. If there is ambiguity, additional qualifiers can be added to make it unique. For example, if there are two versions of the `regex` package in the graph, then it can be qualified with a version to make it unique, such as `regex@1.4.3`.

Package ID specifications output by cargo, for example in cargo metadata output, are fully qualified.

### Specification grammar

The formal grammar for a Package Id Specification is:

    spec := pkgname |
            [ kind "+" ] proto "://" hostname-and-path [ "?" query] [ "#" ( pkgname | semver ) ]
    query = ( "branch" | "tag" | "rev" ) "=" ref
    pkgname := name [ ("@" | ":" ) semver ]
    semver := digits [ "." digits [ "." digits [ "-" prerelease ] [ "+" build ]]]

    kind = "registry" | "git" | "path"
    proto := "http" | "git" | "file" | ...

Here, brackets indicate that the contents are optional.

The URL form can be used for git dependencies, or to differentiate packages that come from different sources such as different registries.

### Example specifications

The following are references to the `regex` package on `crates.io`:

Spec | Name | Version
--- | --- | ---
`regex` | `regex` | `*`
`regex@1.4` | `regex` | `1.4.*`
`regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`
`https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index#regex` | `regex` | `*`
`https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index#regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`
`registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index#regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`

The following are some examples of specs for several different git dependencies:

Spec | Name | Version
--- | --- | ---
`https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo#0.52.0` | `cargo` | `0.52.0`
`https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo#cargo-platform@0.1.2` | `cargo-platform` | `0.1.2`
`ssh://git@github.com/rust-lang/regex.git#regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`
`git+ssh://git@github.com/rust-lang/regex.git#regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`
`git+ssh://git@github.com/rust-lang/regex.git?branch=dev#regex@1.4.3` | `regex` | `1.4.3`

Local packages on the filesystem can use `file://` URLs to reference them:

Spec | Name | Version
--- | --- | ---
`file:///path/to/my/project/foo` | `foo` | `*`
`file:///path/to/my/project/foo#1.1.8` | `foo` | `1.1.8`
`path+file:///path/to/my/project/foo#1.1.8` | `foo` | `1.1.8`

### Brevity of specifications

The goal of this is to enable both succinct and exhaustive syntaxes for referring to packages in a dependency graph. Ambiguous references may refer to one or more packages. Most commands generate an error if more than one package could be referred to with the same specification.