Announcing Rustup 1.28.0

Mar. 2, 2025 · The Rustup Team

The rustup team is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.28.0. Rustup is the recommended tool to install Rust, a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

What's new in rustup 1.28.0

This new release of rustup has been a long time in the making and comes with substantial changes.

Before digging into the details, it is worth mentioning that Chris Denton has joined the team. Chris has a lot of experience contributing to Windows-related parts of the Rust Project -- expertise we were previously lacking -- so we're happy to have him on board to help address Windows-specific issues.

The following improvements might require changes to how you use rustup:

  • rustup will no longer automatically install the active toolchain if it is not installed.

    • To ensure its installation, run rustup toolchain install with no arguments.
    • The following command installs the active toolchain both before and after this change: 
      rustup show active-toolchain || rustup toolchain install
# Or, on older versions of PowerShell:
rustup show active-toolchain; if ($LASTEXITCODE -ne 0) { rustup toolchain install }

  • Installing a host-incompatible toolchain via rustup toolchain install or rustup default will now be rejected unless you explicitly add the --force-non-host flag.

Rustup now officially supports the following host platforms:

  • aarch64-pc-windows-msvc
  • loongarch64-unknown-linux-musl

This release also comes with various quality-of-life improvements, to name a few:

  • rustup show's output format has been cleaned up, making it easier to find out about your toolchains' status.
  • rustup doc now accepts a flag and a topic at the same time, enabling quick navigation to specific parts of more books.
  • rustup's remove subcommands now support more aliases such as rm and del.
  • Basic support for nushell has been added.

We have additionally made the following internal changes:

  • The default download backend has been changed from reqwest with native-tls to reqwest with rustls.
    • RUSTUP_USE_CURL and RUSTUP_USE_RUSTLS can still be used to change the download backend if the new backend causes issues. If issues do happen, please let us know.
    • The default backend now uses rustls-platform-verifier to verify server certificates, taking advantage of the platform's certificate store on platforms that support it.
  • When creating proxy links, rustup will now try symlinks first and fall back to hardlinks, as opposed to trying hardlinks first.
  • A new RUSTUP_LOG environment variable can be used to control tracing-based logging in rustup binaries. See the dev guide for more details.

Finally, there are some notable changes to our official website as well:

  • The overall design of the website has been updated to better align with the Rust Project's branding.
  • It is now possible to download the prebuilt rustup-init.sh installer for the aarch64-pc-windows-msvc host platform via https://win.rustup.rs/aarch64.

Further details are available in the changelog!

How to update

If you have a previous version of rustup installed, getting rustup 1.28.0 is as easy as stopping any programs which may be using Rustup (e.g. closing your IDE) and running:

$ rustup self update

Rustup will also automatically update itself at the end of a normal toolchain update:

$ rustup update

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website.

Rustup's documentation is also available in the rustup book.

Caveats

Rustup releases can come with problems not caused by rustup itself but just due to having a new release. As such, we recommend paying attention to the following potential issues in particular:

  • Anti-malware scanners might be blocking rustup or stopping it from creating or copying files (especially when installing rust-docs, since it contains many small files).

  • In your CI environment, rustup might fail when trying to perform a self-update.

    This is a known issue, and in the case where this issue does occur, we recommend applying the following workaround at the beginning of your workflow:

    $ rustup set auto-self-update disable

    Also, starting from 1.28.0, rustup will no longer attempt to self-update in CI environments, so this workaround should not be necessary in the future.

These issues should be automatically resolved in a few weeks when the anti-malware scanners are updated to be aware of the new rustup release, and the hosted version is updated across all CI runners.

Thanks

Thanks again to all the contributors who made rustup 1.28.0 possible!