Where does rustup install itself to?

Adrian picture Adrian · Oct 14, 2017 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

I understand that rustup installs the rustc and cargo binaries to ~/.cargo/bin, but where does it install the rustup executable to? As far as I can tell this isn't explained in any documentation and running the installer doesn't tell you either. I'd like to avoid it being installed to anywhere except my home directory, if possible. I'm using macOS if that makes a difference.

Answer

Shepmaster picture Shepmaster · Oct 14, 2017

By default, rustup is also installed to your home directory:

$ which rustup
/Users/shep/.cargo/bin/rustup

The documentation states:

rustup installs rustc, cargo, rustup and other standard tools to Cargo's bin directory. On Unix it is located at $HOME/.cargo/bin and on Windows at %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin. This is the same directory that cargo install will install Rust programs and Cargo plugins.

It goes on to describe how to change the defaults:

rustup allows you to customise your installation by setting the environment variables CARGO_HOME and RUSTUP_HOME before running the rustup-init executable. As mentioned in the Environment Variables section, RUSTUP_HOME sets the root rustup folder, which is used for storing installed toolchains and configuration options. CARGO_HOME contains cache files used by cargo.