Running cargo commands in a subdirectory?

[jduan]

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Motivation

My understanding is this github action only supports running cargo commands from the root of the repo. Is it possible to run cargo commands from a subdirectory? The motivation is that I have a monorepo that has projects that use different languages. I'd like to run cargo commands only for the rust projects.

Additional context

I've tried to set "working-directory" at the top level but that didn't seem to work.

[Gottox]

This is also needed if you have a workspace project and want to tests with feature flags:

$ cargo test --features 'env'          
error: --features is not allowed in the root of a virtual workspace
note: while this was previously accepted, it didn't actually do anything

[Gottox]

Actually, while digging through the source, I suspect this is an actual bug in https://github.com/actions/toolkit. If you look at this comment, it states that if cwd is unset, it defaults to the current working directory, which is set by the working-directory option in the yaml:

https://github.com/actions/toolkit/blob/ea503a235e2ad9ef6aada2f72d62cbed17d31c76/packages/exec/src/interfaces.ts#L6-L7

[lisheeghan]

Perhaps this works?

      - name: Run cargo check
        uses: actions-rs/cargo@v1
        with:
          command: check
          args: --manifest-path dir1/dir2/Cargo.toml

[Gottox]

This works around this issue. Nevertheless I think this is a bug.

[qwandor]

I could also use a way to run cargo commands from a subdirectory, especially when using cargo deb which has a bug (https://github.com/mmstick/cargo-deb/issues/151) where it doesn't work properly if run from the workspace root.

[huangjj27]

I have a same requirement as to publish crates onto crates.io in a workspace through an action trigger.

[unizippro]

So it seems we are waiting for #59 to be merged. As a workaround one could use marco-polos branch

[lukepighetti]

I also expected this to use

defaults:
  run:
    working-directory: my-rust-project

As the working directory for where cargo run is run

[lpil]

Is there a way to do this? I cannot set the manifest path as that's not the directory I wish to run cargo from. 🙏

[rherrmannr]

@lpil yes, as others stated you could use the --manifest-path:

cargo build --manifest-path /path/to/your/Cargo.toml

[ryankurte]

it'd still be neat to have this! --manifest-path doesn't work correctly with .cargo/config.toml and is usually broken when cross-compiling

[goughjo02]

I ended up changing it to this