A checklist for ongoing Rust project maintenance tasks. Think of it as regular checkups for your project, like a car inspection 🚗 or spring-cleaning ✨. I also wrote an article on the topic.

Pro tip: Create a copy of this list for every check interval (e.g. every 6 months) for documentation.

• [ ] Update your local Rust tooling with rustup. Simply run rustup update.
• [ ] Compile the project locally by following the instructions from the docs.
• [ ] Check the compiler output for warnings.
• [ ] Check if the README.md is still up-to-date.
• [ ] Check if your tests still pass (in case it’s not covered by CI/CD).
• [ ] While you’re at it, check your test coverage (e.g. with tarpaulin).
• [ ] To find missing tests, try tools like cargo mutants, which injects bugs into your code to see if your tests catch them!
• [ ] Run cargo update to update dependencies to the latest version of your Cargo.lock.
• [ ] Run cargo upgrade on a new branch, to see if you can safely upgrade to the latest versions of your dependency.
• [ ] If you cannot upgrade, open an issue to track the problem and investigate the root cause.
• [ ] Run cargo audit to find security issues in crates.
• [ ] Run cargo udeps to find unused dependencies.
• [ ] Run cargo clippy for new lints.
• [ ] Run cargo modules orphans to find unused modules in your tree
• [ ] Update your CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Rust versions, etc.). Take a look at https://github.com/jonhoo/rust-ci-conf/ to integrate the latest best-practices around CI/CD into your project.
• [ ] Check that each feature compiles with cargo hack. You can run it with cargo hack check --each-feature --no-dev-deps. This will iterate over all features of your project and checks that the project compiles. It also checks your default features and --no-default-features of the package.
• [ ] Merge, update, or close open pull requests.