Formatting

Available since version 0.26.0

cargo-generate formats the generated Rust files with rustfmt. Templates rarely produce rustfmt-clean output, as conditionals and whitespace control are tedious to get right.

Formatting happens once the template has been expanded and moved to its final destination.

What gets formatted

Only the files written by this run, and only those with a .rs extension.

This matters for --init, where a template is expanded into a directory that may already hold a project. A template that adds a controller or a db module gets its own files formatted, while the surrounding code is left as it was.

Each file is formatted against the edition of the cargo package it lands in, so a generated workspace whose members use different editions is handled correctly.

When nothing happens

A template that generates no .rs files has nothing to format. The same applies to Rust files generated outside of a cargo project, as there is no manifest to read an edition from.

⚠️ NOTE: formatting never fails a generation. If the rustfmt component is missing, or rustfmt rejects a file it cannot parse, cargo-generate warns and leaves the generated files unformatted.

Opting out as a template author

[template]
fmt = false

Use this when the template output is meant to be left exactly as written.

Opting out as a user

cargo generate --git https://github.com/example/template.git --no-fmt

--no-fmt wins over anything the template asks for.

Opting back in explicitly

A template that has opted out may still request formatting by name:

[template]
fmt = false

[hooks]
post = ["fmt"]

fmt is not a script file, it is an identifier for the built-in step, and it takes precedence over fmt = false. See hook types for how it differs from a script hook.

The name fmt is reserved, so a hook script cannot use it. Any other name works, including fmt.rhai. A template file named fmt is unaffected, and is templated and copied like any other file.