Automated way to create an alias for cargo subcommand?

[k0pernicus]

Describe the problem you are trying to solve

I am trying to create an alias for cargo-generate.
The crate cargo-generate is automatically used when executing cargo generate.
With the help of structopt, we created an alias called gen to execute cargo-generate using cargo run -- gen instead of cargo run -- generate.

After installing the crate locally (cargo install --path .), the current way to execute cargo generate is to let cargo make an invocation of an external tool cargo-${command}, so cargo gen is an unknown command to cargo.

Describe the solution you'd like

A solution to create aliases is to generate a file called config inside $HOME/.cargo, and fill it with an alias, like this:

[alias]
gen = "generate"

but this method needs a manual intervention from the user.

I would like to know if it exists an "automated" way to create this alias easily after installing the crate on a system, or not.

Notes

Original issue, posted in cargo-generate, here.

Thanks a lot!

[CPerezz]

You actually have the capability of stating these aliases. See the docs.

I'm not sure if I really understand the details of your issue but what you're trying to do may be doable by adding to the build.rs of your cargo command crate some code that sets this alias in .cargo.toml for example.

A better option anyway is to maybe display some message suggesting to add the alias to the config. Since users might have it symlinked or many other stuff that you might want to avoid dealing with.

I'm not sure wether this can be done on any other way.

[rnag]

there's minor problems with both of the posts above. for example, #[alias] isn't picked up by cargo - looks like removing # works; for the second post, the link just leads back to this same page. there should be a link to docs on alias somewhere on the web though, but it's a pain because the link provided here actually doesn't lead anywhere.

[josecelano]

there's minor problems with both of the posts above. for example, #[alias] isn't picked up by cargo - looks like removing # works; for the second post, the link just leads back to this same page. there should be a link to docs on alias somewhere on the web though, but it's a pain because the link provided here actually doesn't lead anywhere.

This seems to be the right link:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/config.html#alias

But it does not work for me with or without the #:

#[alias]
cov = "llvm-cov --lcov --output-path=./coverage/lcov.info"

[alias]
cov = "llvm-cov --lcov --output-path=./coverage/lcov.info"

[weihanglo]

@josecelano, if you're talking about how aliases work in genernal, that should just work when the configuration file is in one of the paths of configuration discovery, and have a cargo-llvm-cov binary under your $PATH.

[josecelano]

Thank you @weihanglo. It works now using ./cargo/config.toml. I thought I could use the ./config.toml in the root dir.