Crates.io: Allow people to directly download crate source tarball

[sfackler]

I find it useful if I want to check out a package before depending on it or need to look at the source.

[alexcrichton]

This was originally offered, but this is somewhat nuanced. The fact that the download is a tarball is an implementation detail, so this would need to be accompanied with equivalent support in Cargo itself it inspect and unpack the .crate file that was downloaded.

[gdamjan]

There needs to be some pointer to the source, regardless what's in the projects Cargo.toml.

Take for ex. https://crates.io/crates/servo-glutin/0.4.10 the only link is to https://github.com/tomaka/glutin which doesn't even have a 0.4.10 version/tag (and this is actually the servo/glutin repo).

The servo/glutin repo only has a servo-0.4.10 tag, which I don't know if is the version on crates.io

[flying-sheep]

as a packager, i need this. i need to point to a file and say “download this and verify with that sha1” instead of “let something download stuff for me”

[carols10cents]

So the URLs https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/name/version/download work, but that's not really exposed anywhere.

In what manner would yinz want to see this exposed? API docs? A link on the crate page?

[ljedrz]

So the URLs https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/name/version/download work

It doesn't work anymore; it used to in the past, but I tried it with a few crates and it didn't do the trick, at least not with a browser.

related Stack Overflow question

[carols10cents]

It doesn't work anymore; it used to in the past, but I tried it with a few crates and it didn't do the trick, at least not with a browser.

It won't work with a browser, no, but curl should work.

[ljedrz]

It won't work with a browser, no, but curl should work.

I checked it; it works.

I would suggest describing this download method in the API docs, especially since it is not trivial - you need to pass the -L option (follow redirects), otherwise you may not receive anything. In addition, although the downloaded file's extension is .crate (and after unzipping it the file has a .crate extension again), it is a tarball (.tar.gz).

[sgrif]

It should work in the browser after the next deploy

[carols10cents]

Deployed! this should now work!