Setting Up Your Environment

Before we can build a Copper project, we need Rust 1.95 or newer and the Copper project bootstrap tool.

Install Rust

Follow the official installation guide at https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/, or run:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

After installation, make sure cargo is available and recent enough:

cargo --version
rustc --version

Install cargo-cunew

cargo-cunew scaffolds a new Copper project from the official Copper templates:

cargo install cargo-cunew

Generate our first simple Copper project

Generate a new project directly:

cargo cunew my_project

This generates a complete, ready-to-compile Copper project at the path you specify.

For more details, see the official documentation: https://copper-project.github.io/copper-rs/Project-Templates/

What you get

The generated project contains everything you need:

my_project/
├── build.rs              # Build script (required by Copper logging)
├── Cargo.toml            # Dependencies
├── copperconfig.ron      # Task graph definition
├── justfile              # Helper commands (logreader, replay, DAG rendering)
└── src/
    ├── main.rs           # Runtime entry point
    ├── logreader.rs      # Offline log export utility
    ├── resim.rs          # Replay / remote-debug entry point
    └── tasks.rs          # Your task implementations

In the next chapter, we’ll explore what each of these files does.

Try it

You can try to compile and run your project:

cd my_project
cargo run

It will compile and run, and you’ll start to receive some messages:

00:00:01.1781 [Debug] Received message: 42
00:00:01.1781 [Debug] Sink Received message: 43

Kill the process and let’s move to the next chapter.