Ability to specify the output name for a bin target different from the crate name

[crumblingstatue]

As far as I know, the only way to name the output of a bin target is through the name attribute of a bin section.

This, however, sets both the crate name and the output name.

It seems too restricting that the output name of an executable should be a valid crate name.
For example, it cannot contain spaces. Cargo also warns if it's uppercase, because crate names are lowercase by convention.

Rustc with the -o FILENAME option allows to set any arbitrary filename for the output.

If there is already a way to do this with cargo, it should be better documented, as I couldn't find it.

[alexcrichton]

I think this can be solved with cargo rustc (a relatively new subcommand), so I'm going to classify this as a docs bug.

[crumblingstatue]

How does cargo rustc solve this problem?

What I'm thinking of is the ability to specify the output name of the executable in Cargo.toml, so everyone who compiles it gets that executable name.

[alexcrichton]

Yes cargo rustc would not allow you to encode the value in Cargo.toml, cargo does not currently allow that level of configuration.

[ebkalderon]

I would like to express interest in this feature as well.

[cutewalker]

yes， +1 for this feature

[VelocityRa]

One whole year and still nothing...

[iddm]

+1 for this feature.

[Lakier15]

+1 for this feature

[Boscop]

Yes, please :)

[matklad]

@brettcannon binary can have a name different from the name of he package, you can see it in Cargo toml in a [[bin]] section with the name key

[brettcannon]

@matklad yep, and I deleted my comment as it was incorrect; sorry about the noise; misunderstanding on my part when looking for a solution for my problem. (And feel free to hide this comment.)

[whereistejas]

Hi everyone,
If possible I would like to take up this issue. Based on the discussion above, we can summarise the requirements as follows:

1. output name of the binary should not have the restrictions of a crate name.
2. add a second key in [[bin]] section along with name called filename.
   1. name will allow us to set the name of the crate.
   2. filename will allow us to set the name of the binary.
3. only allow this config options in [[bin]] and [[example]].

@alexcrichton @ehuss please correct me if I'm wrong about the above requirements.

@rustbot claim

[ehuss]

Closing as this is now implemented via #9627, and stabilization tracked in #9778.

[eureka-cpu]

We'll probably want to only allow this on [[bin]] and [[example]] targets to start off. Configuring the file stem of a [lib] target should likely be an error

I need this feature for a [lib]. My use case: I write plugins for other software in Rust, which are technically shared libraries (crate-type = ["dylib"]: .so files, as I'm workig on Linux), but should be named something.plugin instead of libsomething.so.

Such a good suggestion. I'm writing a plugin atm and I have a post-install script that renames the resulting "lib", since it's prefixed with lib and there doesn't seem to be a direct way of telling cargo to just use the name field. Strange that it does this by default.