Could not find `Cargo.toml` when building a dependent crate from GitHub

Question

I'm trying to use the rust-mosquitto library. My current Cargo.toml is:

[package]
name = "HomeDaemon"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["RTR <[email protected]>"]

[dependencies.mosquitto]
git = "https://github.com/kteza1/rust-mosquitto"

When I run cargo build, following error is reported:

Could not find `Cargo.toml` in `/Users/ravitejareddy/.cargo/git/checkouts/rust-mosquitto-8203e77dcf072bf7/rust-mosquitto`

The actual download in ~/.cargo/git/checkouts/rust-mosquitto-8203e77dcf072bf7/master shows that Cargo.toml is present.

There is an extra rust-mosquitto in the path above, is that a problem?

Yvon Manzi Yvon Manzi · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-13T14:22:05

This does not specifically answer the question that @tez asked, but I encountered the same error with a slightly different root culprit. I was writing some simple code in vim, so I created a simple main.rs file. When I cargo run it, it was spitting out the same error:

error: could not find Cargo.toml in /Users/yvonmanzi/Documents/Rust or any parent directory

The surprising thing, without the hindsight, of course, was that rustc main.rs was creating a binary executable as expected while cargo run wasn't. It turns out I had created all my rust packages(aka projects) up to that point using cargo new project-name --bin as shown here, thus by default including Cargo.lock, Cargo.toml, and src folder. Hopefully, it is clear by now that mine was just a simple rookie mistake; I simply, quite literally, didn't have Cargo.toml in my project folder. So, dear fellow rooky league Rustacean, if you get the same error, create your project with cargo new project-name --bin command.

Could not find `Cargo.toml` when building a dependent crate from GitHub

3 Answers