cargo-manifest-check

Check the formatting of your manifest files

cargo-manifest-check checks that various items from your manifest files are formatted as expected. It is currently mostly concerned with checking the order of items, and does not currently allow to automatically sort them. It may gain that ability in the future.

It is primarily intended for use in CI, and is relatively opinionated; it does not currently offer any kind of configuration.

Installation and Usage

cargo-manifest-check can be installed from source through crates.io:

cargo install --locked cargo-manifest-check

It can then be used as a Cargo subcommand as follows:

cargo manifest-check [paths...]

If paths are directories, they will be recursively searched for manifest files. If no paths are given, then the current working directory is searched. Hidden and .gitignored directories will not be searched.

What is Checked

The following items are checked:

• Lexicographic ordering
  • Dependency sections
    • [workspace.dependencies]
    • [dependencies]
    • [dev-dependencies]
    • [build-dependencies]
    • [target.*.dependencies]
  • The workspace.members array
  • [patch.*] sections
  • features arrays in dependencies
  • Feature arrays in [features] sections, keeping dep: features grouped first
• Specific ordering
  • Manifest keys and sections
  • [package] keys
  • [workspace.package] keys
• Workspace inheritance syntax
  • Dependency inheritance must use an explicit inline table (i.e., = { workspace = true }) instead of a dotted key (i.e., .workspace = true)

Dependencies can be grouped (by surrounding them with blank lines), in which case ordering is checked within each group individually.

See the tests/fixtures directory for examples of manifests that would be accepted/rejected.

What is not Checked

The following is not currently checked:

• Lexicographic ordering
  • Dotted dependency tables (e.g., [dependencies.foo])
• Specific ordering
  • [profile.*] keys
  • target tables keys
• Workspace inheritance syntax
  • Package key inheritance must use a dotted key (i.e., .workspace = true) instead of an explicit inline table (i.e., = { workspace = true })

Support for these may be added later.

Additionally, cargo-manifest-check does not check that the manifest files are valid manifests (e.g., that keys exist and are valid); it only checks their formatting.

Compatibility

• If new checks are introduced which would reject manifests previously accepted, the SemVer version will be updated to reflect that.
• The current console output is however not intended for machine consumption and no compatibility guarantees are provided. Another output format meant for parsing may be introduced in the future, so it can be used with tools like efm-langserver.

Contributing

This linter is opinionated on purpose and it is planned to limit configuration as much as possible. However if you have found some bugs regarding formatting checking or you think some other checks could be added (where one obvious order exists), please do open an issue.

License

Copyright 2024–2025 AudaciousAxiom

This project is licensed under MPL-2.0.