What I'm most familiar with when it comes to publishing CLI tools is NPM. However, since Rust requires a build step I don't really feel like crates.io is set up for that on its own. There exist OS-specific package managers like apt and homebrew, but I'm not super excited about the prospect of going around and maintaining separate publications on each of those, especially since I don't even use Linux really. And of course Windows would be left out of the loop, even though the tool should build and run just fine there in theory.
I wish there were a CLI-focused package manager for Rust tools that would just download a tool's crate from crates.io, do a release build for the local architecture, and add it to your path. Does this exist (if not it could be my next project...)? And if not, what's the conventional practice here?
Edit: I just discovered the "cargo install" command, which is basically what I described above: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch14-04-installing-binaries.html. I'm still wondering about convention, though. Do people ever publish runnable crates on crates.io and call it a day?
Note that Homebrew is now available on Linux, I use it almost exclusively because packages are way more up to date than OS repositories
> What I'm most familiar with when it comes to publishing CLI tools is NPM. However, since Rust requires a build step I don't really feel like crates.io is set up for that on its own.
FWIW, I'd second hazebooth's nod towards simply publishing on crates.io.
I think you may be overthinking this, but that said I personally go the route of having CI cross-compile binaries for each OS and arch type that I host in order to minimize dependencies on the systems that run them (e.g. avoid installing the Go or Rust compiler).
I don't personally maintain package manager options (e.g. apt and brew) for projects because, as you mentioned, it'd be a lot of work. Plus, to be quite frank, when and if a project is popular enough that a large enough audience uses it, one day you'll find that someone else has added a package for it to e.g. apt or brew.
But given your familiarity w/ NPM - if you are interested in precompiling binaries for each system - you might want to take a look at Cloudflare's wrangler[0], their tooling for interacting with Cloudflare Workers. wrangler is published to both crates.io and NPM (the latter using a script to pull down pre-compiled binaries they host).
Edit: Another option, if you want really want to make your project available via a "package manager" that isn't crates.io, would be to release a Docker image. This is an option for CLI tooling - e.g. Hashicorp publishes Packer[1] and Terraform[2] Docker images. That way you don't need to worry about compiling binaries for macOS, linux w/ glibc, linux w/ musl, etc. Just publish a single Docker image, ideally as small as possible.
[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler [1] http://hub.docker.com/r/hashicorp/packer [2] http://hub.docker.com/r/hashicorp/terraform