Installing Rust and Cargo on Ubuntu 21.10 using Ansible
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Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your...

Date: February 6, 2022

Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your development machine if it ever goes down.

Personal philosophy
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I try to install everything that I will want to use for more than just a trial inside of my ansible playbook. This way I always get the same setup across my work and home machines, and anytime I might setup a throw away vm.

reccommended install
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This is how rust reccomends that you install it on Ubuntu. First update your system, then run their installer, and finally check that the install was successful.

[code]
  # system update
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt upgrade
  
  # download and run the rust installer
  curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
  
  # confirm your installation is successful
  rustc --version

Ansible Install
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The first thing I do in my playbooks is to check if the tool is already installed. Here I chose to look for cargo, you could also look for rustc.

[code]
    - name: check if cargo is installed
      shell: command -v cargo
      register: cargo_exists
      ignore_errors: yes

│ I first check for an existing install so I can re-run my playbooks quickly filling in only missing tools. More on this ansible install conditionally <https://waylonwalker.com/til/ansible_install_if_not_callable/>

Next we need to download the installer script and make it executable.

[code]
    - name: Download Installer
      when: cargo_exists is failed
      get_url:
        url: https://sh.rustup.rs
        dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
        mode: '0755'
        force: 'yes'
      tags:
        - rust

│ I chose to download the installer, because I was unable to pass in the -y flag otherwise, which is required to do unattended installs.

Last we just run the installer given to us by rust with the -y flag so that it will run unattended.

[code]
    - name: install rust/cargo
      when: cargo_exists is failed
      shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
      tags:
        - rust

One more thing
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Make sure that you source your cargo env, otherwise your shell will not find rustc or cargo. I chose to do this by adding the following line to my ~/.zshrc. You can but it in ~/.bashrc if that is your thing, or just run it in your shell to just get it to work.

[code]
  [ -f ~/.cargo/env ] && source $HOME/.cargo/env

Full Install Playbook
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Here is a fully working install playbook to get you started or to port into your own playbook.

[code]
  - hosts: localhost
    gather_facts: true
    become: true
    become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}"
  
    pre_tasks:
      - name: update repositories
        apt: update_cache=yes
        become_user: root
        changed_when: False
    vars:
      user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}"
    tasks:
    - name: check if cargo is installed
      shell: command -v cargo
      register: cargo_exists
      ignore_errors: yes
  
    - name: Download Installer
      when: cargo_exists is failed
      get_url:
        url: https://sh.rustup.rs
        dest: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs
        mode: '0755'
        force: 'yes'
      tags:
        - rust
  
    - name: install rust/cargo
      when: cargo_exists is failed
      shell: /tmp/sh.rustup.rs -y
      tags:
        - rust

You can save this as a local.yml and run the following in your shell to run the playbook on your local machine.

[code]
  ansible-playbook local.yml --ask-become-pass

│ note: --ask-become-pass is required for the system update step. This will ask for your password as soon as ansible starts.

I also have a very similar article on hwo I ansible install fonts <https://waylonwalker.com/til/ansible_install_fonts/>