cargo-unmaintained

Find unmaintained packages in Rust projects

cargo-unmaintained is similar to cargo-audit. However, cargo-unmaintained finds unmaintained packages automatically using heuristics, rather than rely on users to manually submit them to the RustSec Advisory Database.

cargo-unmaintained defines an unmaintained package X as one that satisfies one of 1 through 3 below:

1. X's repository is archived (see Notes below).

2. X is not a member of its named repository.

3. Both a and b below.

   a. X depends on a package Y whose latest version:

   • is incompatible with the version that X depends on
   • was released over a year ago (a configurable value)

   b. Either X has no associated repository, or its repository's last commit was over a year ago (a configurable value).

As of 2024-06-17, the RustSec Advisory Database contains 98 active advisories for unmaintained packages. Using the above conditions, cargo-unmaintained automatically identifies 71 of them (more than two thirds). These results can be reproduced by running the rustsec_advisories binary within this repository.

Notes

• To check whether packages' repositories have been archived, set the GITHUB_TOKEN_PATH environment variable to the path of a file containing a personal access token. If unset, this check will be skipped.

• The above conditions consider a "leaf" package (i.e., a package with no dependencies) unmaintained only if conditions 1 or 2 apply.

• The purpose of the "over a year ago" qualifications in condition 3 is to give package maintainers a chance to update their packages. That is, an incompatible upgrade to one of X's dependencies could require time-consuming changes to X. Without this check, cargo-unmaintained would produce many false positives.

• Of the 27 packages in the RustSec Advisory Database not identified by cargo-unmaintained:

  • 8 do not build
  • 3 are existent, unarchived leaves
  • 1 were updated within the past 365 days
  • 15 were not identified for other reasons

Output

cargo-unmaintained's output includes the number of days since a package's repository was last updated, along with the dependencies that cause the package to be considered unmaintained.

For example, the following is the output produced by running cargo-unmaintained on Cargo 0.74.0 on 2023-11-11:

Installation

cargo install cargo-unmaintained

Usage

Usage: cargo unmaintained [OPTIONS]

Options:
      --color <WHEN>    When to use color: always, auto, or never [default: auto]
      --fail-fast       Exit as soon as an unmaintained package is found
      --max-age <DAYS>  Age in days that a repository's last commit must not exceed for the
                        repository to be considered current; 0 effectively disables this check,
                        though ages are still reported [default: 365]
      --no-cache        Do not cache data on disk for future runs
      --no-exit-code    Do not set exit status when unmaintained packages are found
      --no-warnings     Do not show warnings
  -p, --package <NAME>  Check only whether package NAME is unmaintained
      --tree            Show paths to unmaintained packages
      --verbose         Show information about what cargo-unmaintained is doing
  -h, --help            Print help
  -V, --version         Print version

The `GITHUB_TOKEN_PATH` environment variable can be set to the path of a file containing a personal
access token. If set, cargo-unmaintained will use this token to authenticate to GitHub and check
whether packages' repositories have been archived.

Unless --no-exit-code is passed, the exit status is 0 if no unmaintained packages were found and no
irrecoverable errors occurred, 1 if unmaintained packages were found, and 2 if an irrecoverable
error occurred.

Ignoring packages

If a workspace's Cargo.toml file includes a workspace.metadata.unmaintained.ignore array, all packages named therein will be ignored. Example:

[workspace.metadata.unmaintained]
ignore = ["matchers"]

Testing

Some tests are stored in a separate package ei because they are "externally influenced," i.e., they rely on data from external sources. To run these additional tests, use the following command:

cargo test --package ei

Known problems

If a project relies on an old version of a package, cargo-unmaintained may fail to flag the package as unmaintained (i.e., may produce a false negative). The following is a sketch of how this can occur.

• The project relies on version 1 of package X, which has no dependencies.
• Version 2 of package X exists, and adds version 1 of package Y as a dependency.
• Version 2 of package Y exists.

Note that version 1 of package X appears maintained, but version 2 does not. Ignoring a few details, version 2 satisfies condition 3 above.

cargo-unmaintained does not, in all cases, check whether the latest version of a package is used, as doing so would be cost prohibitive. A downside of this choice is that false negatives can result.

Note that false positives should not arise in a corresponding way. Before flagging a package as unmaintained, cargo-unmaintained verifies that the package's latest version would be considered unmaintained as well.

Anti-goals

cargo-unmaintained is not meant to be a replacement for cargo-upgrade. cargo-unmaintained should not warn just because a package needs to be upgraded.

Semantic versioning policy

We reserve the right to change what data is stored in the cache, as well as how that data is stored, and to consider such changes non-breaking.

License

cargo-unmaintained is licensed and distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Contact us if you're looking for an exception to the terms.