rustup

rustup is the official toolchain installer and version manager for the Rust programming language, developed and maintained by the Rust Project. With over 6,400 stars as of 2026, rustup is the recommended way to install Rust, replacing the previous standalone installers. rustup manages multiple Rust toolchains (stable, beta, and nightly channels), allowing developers to install, update, and switch between different Rust compiler versions on the same machine without conflicts. Key features include: multi-toolchain management (rustup install stable, rustup install nightly, rustup install 1.75.0, with support for specific dated versions), toolchain overriding per-directory (rustup override set nightly for projects that require a specific toolchain, stored in rust-toolchain.toml for team-wide consistency), cross-compilation target installation (rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown for WebAssembly, aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu for ARM Linux, x86_64-pc-windows-msvc for Windows), component management (installing additional components like rust-src for IDE support, rust-analyzer for language server protocol, clippy for linting, rustfmt for formatting, and miri for undefined behavior detection), profile-based installation (minimal, default, and complete profiles that pre-select toolchain components), automatic updates (rustup update to update all installed toolchains to latest), proxy system (rustup acts as a proxy for rustc, cargo, rustdoc, clippy, and other commands, automatically routing to the active toolchain), self-update capability (rustup self update to update rustup itself), shell completions for bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell, and elvish, and documentation installation (rustup doc to open local std docs, rustup doc --book for the Rust Programming Language book).