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. If you run into build issues, please try with --locked before reporting an issue.

cargo nextest must be compiled and installed with Rust 1.88 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