Installing from source

If pre-built binaries are not available for your platform, or you'd otherwise like to install cargo-nextest from source, here's what you need to do:

Installing from crates.io

Run the following command:

cargo install cargo-nextest --locked

Warning

A plain cargo install cargo-nextest without --locked is not supported and will not work.

0.9.124 If you attempt to cargo install nextest without --locked, the build will fail with a message asking you to use --locked.

cargo nextest must be compiled and installed with Rust 1.89 or later (see Stability policy for more), but it can build and run tests against most versions of Rust going back several years.

Using a cached install in CI

Most CI users of nextest will benefit from using cached binaries. Consider using the pre-built binaries for this purpose.

See this example for how the nextest repository uses pre-built binaries.

If your CI is based on GitHub Actions, you may use the baptiste0928/cargo-install action to build cargo-nextest from source and cache the cargo-nextest binary.

jobs:
  ci:
    # ...
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      # Install a Rust toolchain here.
      - name: Install cargo-nextest
        uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
        with:
          crate: cargo-nextest
          locked: true
          # Uncomment the following line if you'd like to stay on the 0.9 series
          # version: 0.9
      # At this point, cargo-nextest will be available on your PATH

Also consider using the Swatinem/rust-cache action to make your builds faster.

Installing from GitHub

Install the latest, in-development version of cargo-nextest from the GitHub repository:

cargo install --git https://github.com/nextest-rs/nextest --bin cargo-nextest