A crate is the smallest amount of code that the Rust compiler considers at a time. Even if you run rather than cargo and pass a single source code file (as we did all the way back in the “Writing and Running a Rust Program” section of Chapter 1), the compiler considers that file to be a crate. Crates can contain modules, and the modules may be defined in other files that get compiled with the crate, as we’ll see in the coming sections.

A crate can come in one of two forms: a binary crate or a library crate. Binary crates are programs you can compile to an executable that you can run, such as a command-line program or a server. Each must have a function called main that defines what happens when the executable runs. All the crates we’ve created so far have been binary crates.

The crate root is a source file that the Rust compiler starts from and makes up the root module of your crate (we’ll explain modules in depth in the “Defining Modules to Control Scope and Privacy” section).

A package is a bundle of one or more crates that provides a set of functionality. A package contains a Cargo.toml file that describes how to build those crates. Cargo is actually a package that contains the binary crate for the command-line tool you’ve been using to build your code. The Cargo package also contains a library crate that the binary crate depends on. Other projects can depend on the Cargo library crate to use the same logic the Cargo command-line tool uses.

Let’s walk through what happens when we create a package. First, we enter the command cargo new:

After we run , we use ls to see what Cargo creates. In the project directory, there’s a Cargo.toml file, giving us a package. There’s also a src directory that contains main.rs. Open Cargo.toml in your text editor, and note there’s no mention of src/main.rs. Cargo follows a convention that src/main.rs is the crate root of a binary crate with the same name as the package. Likewise, Cargo knows that if the package directory contains src/lib.rs, the package contains a library crate with the same name as the package, and src/lib.rs is its crate root. Cargo passes the crate root files to rustc to build the library or binary.