We are excited to announce that rustup 1.29.0 beta is now available for testing and we are currently looking for testers.

What's new

Following the footsteps of many package managers in the pursuit of better toolchain installation performance, the headline of this release is that rustup has been enabled to download components concurrently and unpack during downloads in operations such as rustup update or rustup toolchain and to concurrently check for updates in rustup check, thanks to a GSoC 2025 project. This is by no means a trivial change so a long tail of issues might occur, please report them if you have found any! pr#4388 pr#4426 pr#4436 pr#4455 pr#4471 pr#4605

As usual, we would be happy to receive regression/breakage reports of any kind, especially regarding the installation and/or usage on the following environments:

• New host platforms:

  • sparcv9-sun-solaris pr#4380
  • x86_64-pc-solaris pr#4380

• New shells:

  • tcsh pr#4459
  • xonsh pr#4626

• Environments where you would like to bring your own rust-analyzer binary (such as r-a developers and certain Neovim/Helix users): rustup will now consider the rust-analyzer binary from PATH when the rustup-managed one is not found. pr#4324

• Environments where you would like to override an environment variable back to the default: rustup now treats empty values as unset. pr#4422

How to test

To begin testing this new version, all you need to do is simply switching to the dev environment by setting the following environment variable when updating or installing rustup:

RUSTUP_UPDATE_ROOT=https://dev-static.rust-lang.org/rustup

To switch out of the dev environment, just remove that environment variable and do a rustup self update.

Finally, please don't forget to check out the corresponding section in our CHANGELOG.md for the complete list of changes included in this version.

Acknowledgements

A big thank you to:

• @djc for continuously polishing the codebase to get rid of a whole lot of historical burden and carefully shaping the final form of preliminary concurrency support we have today;
• @ChrisDenton for the careful handling of IO and Windows-related complexities;
• @FranciscoTGouveia for joining me in the GSoC event to investigate the possibilities and lay the foundation of concurrency in rustup;
• @Kobzol for enabling and organizing rustup's participation in GSoC 2025 and improving our CLI's cold start performance;
• ... and many other contributors who have made this new release possible!

Many thanks for everyone's continued support! Wishing you a magical holiday season surrounded by love, peace, and laughter 🍀