Glossary / Rust and crates
Glossary · Rust and crates · checked Oct 24, 2026
crates.io
Short answercrates.io is the Rust community's package registry: cargo downloads dependencies from it and cargo publish uploads to it. Every crate page shows all-time and recent download counts and a daily downloads API.
Why it matters
Its download counter is the number most people quote for a crate's popularity, but it counts every fetch, including CI runners, mirrors and bots on release days.
Our number
Across the top 300 crates, 67,649,690,836 downloads landed in the last ~90 days of our data, and 2% of them within 2 days of a release. Data fetched Oct 24, 2026.
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 408 pages of this site: 376 Crate pages, 10 Articles, 5 paths, 4 The Manual, 4 Guides, 3 Free tools, 1 about, 1 Service, 1 distribution, 1 Open source, 1 Report, 1 service. A few to start with:
- Rust, LLMs, AI agents and app dev, with the receipts.
- crates.io download count: 80% of ours arrived with a new version
- The Manual.
- Q.Why are crates.io download counts inflated?
- Step-by-step guides.
- How to create an App Store Connect API key and use it in CI
- How many real users does your crate have?
- JSON to Rust struct.
Sources
- crates.io data access policy: crates.io/data-access (checked Oct 24, 2026)
- The Cargo Book, Publishing on crates.io: doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/publishing.html (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperOur crates.io download study (This Week in Rust #674)The page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Did this answer your question?