Releasing & sharing our tool

Up until now, every time we have built our project using cargo build or cargo run to trigger a build, our executable (tinymd.exe) has been built in the “debug” folder that is located inside the “target” folder in the project root:

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C:\RustTutorials\
  tinymd\
    \target
      \debug
        tinymd.exe

When you run cargo build with the --release flag, Rust will do a special optimization build of your project, and store it in a “release” folder:

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C:\RustTutorials\
  tinymd\
    \target
      \debug
        tinymd.exe <- the development version of the compiler
      \release
        tinymd.exe <- the release version of the compiler

Let’s go ahead and build it now:

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$ cargo build --release
   Compiling tinymd v0.1.0 (C:\RustTutorials\tinymd)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.76s

Pretty easy!

The development version has debug symbols that Cargo uses to help you during development, which is one reason that the debug version is always going to be slower than the release version. In the release version, Cargo removes all that and also performs some code optimizations. Building a release version takes a little bit more time, but the end result is a faster and smaller executable.

You can now take the executable from the release directory and put it in any folder you want, and as long as you pass it a path with a valid Markdown file that ends in *.md (that only has first-order headings and paragraphs), it will produce a valid HTML file!

After you run cargo build --release, any code changes you make will only appear in the debug version after running cargo build or cargo run. If you want your changes to appear in a new release version, run cargo build --release again.