How to Install Rust on Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13

Since you have landed on the tutorial to install Rust, you might already be aware of what Rust is. If you’re unfamiliar with Rust, here’s a quick overview. Rust is a modern systems programming language used to build high-performance software. Developers who need high performance, low-level hardware control, and reliability choose Rust. Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, and Meta use Rust for performance-critical and security-sensitive software alongside languages like C and C++. Rust is widely used for AI infrastructure, embedded systems, IoT devices, operating systems, blockchain applications, game engines, and networking software. Basically, Rust is used where you need to control hardware or build software to control hardware securely and reliably. Rust includes Cargo by default, its official package manager and build system that helps you manage dependencies, libraries, and Rust projects.

If you are a student or a professional looking to install Rust on your system to build software, you can follow this tutorial. In this tutorial I will guide you to install Rust on Ubuntu 26.04 or on Debian 13 Trixie. We will use the recommended method “rustup” to install because this method makes it easy to keep Rust updated in the future. So let’s get going

Prerequisites

• A system or VM with Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13 installed.
• A user with sudo privileges

Step 1 – Update the System

As always, let’s first update our system

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2 – Install Curl

The next step is to install curl. Curl comes preinstalled on Ubuntu. If it isn’t available on your system, install it using this command

sudo apt install curl -y

Let’s confirm if curl is installed by checking its version

curl --version

Some Rust projects compile native C/C++ code during the build process. Installing build-essential now helps avoid linker and compilation errors later.

sudo apt install build-essential -y

Step 3 – Install Rust

Next we will install Rust on our system using curl.

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

Note:- The installer will show some options, if you know what you're doing, configure the installation using those options, otherwise, you can just press "Enter" and continue with the default settings. Rust compiler, Cargo and rustup will be installed automatically with this installation

Step 4 – Load Rust Environment

After installation, load the Cargo environment into the current shell

source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

Note:- The environment will be loaded automatically when you open a new terminal.

let’s verify the installation by checking Rust’s version

rustc --version

You should see something as below

rustc 1.xx.x

You can also check the Cargo version

cargo --version

You should see something like this

cargo 1.xx.x

If version information is displayed, Rust has been installed successfully.

Step 5 – Create First Project

Now let’s create our first project

cargo new hi_rust

This will create a new directory for your project

Move into the project directory and build and run the project

cd hi_rust
cargo run

You should see the given below output

Compiling hi_rust v0.1.0
Finished dev profile [unoptimized + debuginfo]
Running `target/debug/hi_rust`
Hello, world!

Step 6 – Update Rust

You don’t need to do this right after the installation, but you should do this periodically as Rust receives regular updates with bug fixes, security patches, and new features. With just one command, you can update Rust.

rustup update

With this, Rust has been updated

Check Toolchains

Rustup allows you to manage multiple Rust toolchains. To see the installed and active toolchains, run

rustup show

The “rustup show” command displays the installed toolchains along with the currently active and default toolchain

Install Nightly Toolchain

The Nightly toolchain provides access to experimental language features and the latest compiler improvements. It is mainly intended for testing and development. You can install it simply by executing this

rustup toolchain install nightly

You can switch to nightly with this command

rustup default nightly

and switch back to stable release with this command

rustup default stable

Uninstall Rust

Someday, if you want to uninstall Rust and its add ons completely, you just have to execute this command

rustup self uninstall

and it will be uninstalled

Conclusion

With this, we have successfully installed Rust on our Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13 Trixie system. It only takes a few minutes to install the complete package of the Rust compiler, Cargo, and rustup on Linux.