Scripting with Rust for production release

At work, my team has room to experiment as long as the impact is small if something goes wrong. One of those experiments was a simple deploy.rs for our marketing website. It deploys to DEV and PROD, and it works.

I used rust-script so I could keep the script and its dependencies in one file. The shebang tells the shell what to run, and the fenced cargo block declares the dependencies.

Here’s the shape of it, using the timestamp example from the rust-script docs:

#!/usr/bin/env rust-script
//! ```cargo
//! [dependencies]
//! time = "0.1.25"
//! ```
fn main() {
    println!("{}", time::now().rfc822z());
}

I’d mostly thought of Rust as something I’d reach for when building an application. It was nice to reach for it for one small release script, too.