Customizing Builds with Release Profiles
In Rust, release profiles are predefined and customizable profiles with different configurations that allow a programmer to have more control over various options for compiling code. Each profile is configured independently of the others.
Cargo has two main profiles: the dev
profile Cargo uses when you run cargo build
and the release
profile Cargo uses when you run cargo build --release
. The dev
profile is defined with good defaults for developing, and
the release
profile has good defaults for release builds.
These profile names might be familiar from the output of your builds, which shows the profile used in the build:
$ cargo build
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.0 secs
$ cargo build --release
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.0 secs
The dev
and release
shown in this build output indicate that the compiler
is using different profiles.
Cargo has default settings for each of the profiles that apply when there
aren’t any [profile.*]
sections in the project’s Cargo.toml file. By adding
[profile.*]
sections for any profile we want to customize, we can override
any subset of the default settings. For example, here are the default values
for the opt-level
setting for the dev
and release
profiles:
Filename: Cargo.toml
[profile.dev]
opt-level = 0
[profile.release]
opt-level = 3
The opt-level
setting controls the number of optimizations Rust will apply to
your code with a range of zero to three. Applying more optimizations extends
compiling time, so if you’re in development and compiling your code often, you
want faster compiling even at the expense of the resulting code running slower.
That is the reason the default opt-level
for dev
is 0
. When you’re ready
to release your code, it’s best to spend more time compiling. You’ll only
compile in release mode once and run the compiled program many times, so
release mode trades longer compile time for code that runs faster. That is the
reason the default opt-level
for the release
profile is 3
.
We can override any default setting by adding a different value for it in Cargo.toml. For example, if we want to use optimization level 1 in the development profile, we can add these two lines to our project’s Cargo.toml file:
Filename: Cargo.toml
[profile.dev]
opt-level = 1
This code overrides the default setting of 0
. Now when we run cargo
build
, Cargo will use the defaults for the dev
profile plus our
customization to opt-level
. Because we set opt-level
to 1
, Cargo will
apply more optimizations than the default, but not as many as a release build.
For the full list of configuration options and defaults for each profile, see Cargo’s documentation.