Installation on Windows

Author: Sreeram Peela

Pre-requisites

Rust is the programming language of choice for complex tasks these days. Installing microBioRust in windows requires Rust to be installed and the PATH variables to be added.

We recommend installing Rust (and microBioRust) using Windows Powershell (logged as admin).

Alternately, the latest executables for GUI-based installation can be found here:
https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

1. Navigate to the directory of your choice and open Powershell in admin mode.
2. Download Rust executable from Powershell using the command:

Invoke-WebRequest
-Uri https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup/dist/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc/rustup-init.exe
-OutFile rustup-init.exe
# Run the below command to start installation
.\rustup-init.exe```

Installing Rust typically can be made through Visual Studio Community installer (Select option 1 when prompted). This documentation is written by selecting this option

Installation VS community installer requires downloading additional packages - Win11_SDK and .. Please note that both these require almost 6GB of memory !!

1. Select ‘Default installation’ when prompted.
2. After a typical installation is over, close the powershell and reopen it to make changes in the PATH.

# Check if installation is successful

cargo help

For a successful installation, the above command will display different options and subcommands in Cargo. We will be using this for installing microBioRust (or any Rust package).

Install microBioRust

The microBioRust repo is being hosted on GitHub here. We recommend using Git for smooth installation. Alternatively, users can download the repo as a ZIP file, uncompress it (with your own choice of tools), and navigate to the directory.

# Clone the repo using Git

git clone https://github.com/LCrossman/microBioRust.git  

# Navigate to the dir

cd microBioRust

Inside the directory, one can use Cargo to build the library.

# Inside the project directory
cargo build

The above command downloads and installs necessary dependencies for smooth functioning of the package. Please wait until all the required dependencies are installed and compilation for microBioRust is completed.

Once the package has been built, it is a general practise to test whether installation was successful. For testing the installation, run the command:

# test installation of the package  
cargo test

The above test instance runs over multiple files packed with the repo, and a final output message can help us in understanding errors. Typically, successful installation gives the following last few lines:

Congratulations!! You have successfully installed microBioRust in your system. You can proceed with Getting started section of the documentation.

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