02_setup.md

Setup

Let's get started with our project. First, you'll need to install Rust. Some useful guides:

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch01-01-installation.html
• https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

Note: this course reflects Rust version 1.75.0. If you notice any discrepancies, check your Rust version and leave an issue on Github.

After you have installed Rust and Cargo, you can set up a new rust project using cargo new followed by the name of the project. Let's call this transaction-decoder.

$ cargo new transaction-decoder
$ cd transaction-decoder

This will create a new application in the folder transaction-decoder:

$ tree
.
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── main.rs

2 directories, 2 files

The Cargo.toml file is one of the two metadata files that Cargo uses to manage things like the name, version and package dependencies. It should look something like this:

[package]
name = "transaction-decoder"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

# See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html

[dependencies]

There is a package section which shows some package configuration options and a dependencies section which we'll use to manage any external libraries (or crates) that we'll want to use in our program. Cargo uses this information to fetch and build package dependencies and keeps track of them in the Cargo.lock file.

The next folder we'll look at is src, which contains the main.rs file. This is the entry point of our Rust program. We will call our program from the terminal using $ cargo run. This will compile our program, create an executable file and then run it.

Our src/main.rs file should look like this:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

So if we run $ cargo run in the terminal (from the root directory of our project), we should see Hello, world! printed to the terminal. We will also see in the output that cargo has compiled the program and run the executable file located in target/debug/transaction-decoder.

We're all set up! So let's get started writing some Rust code!

Additional Resources:

• A good overview of the cargo build and cargo run commands can be found here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch01-03-hello-cargo.html.
• For more in-depth information on Cargo, check out the online Cargo book.

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>>> Next Lesson: Our First Function