Profiles

rustup has the concept of “profiles”. They are groups of components you can choose to download while installing a new Rust toolchain. The profiles available at this time are minimal, default, and complete:

• The minimal profile includes as few components as possible to get a working compiler (rustc, rust-std, and cargo). It’s recommended to use this component on Windows systems if you don’t use local documentation (the large number of files can cause issues with some Antivirus systems), and in CI.
• The default profile includes all of components in the minimal profile, and adds rust-docs, rustfmt, and clippy. This profile will be used by rustup by default, and it’s the one recommended for general use.
• The complete profile includes all the components available through rustup. This should never be used, as it includes every component ever included in the metadata and thus will almost always fail. If you are looking for a way to install devtools such as miri or IDE integration tools (rust-analyzer), you should use the default profile and install the needed additional components manually, either by using rustup component add or by using -c when installing the toolchain.

To change the profile rustup install uses by default, you can use the rustup set profile command. For example, to select the minimal profile you can use:

rustup set profile minimal

You can also directly select the profile used when installing a toolchain with:

rustup install --profile <name>

It’s also possible to choose the default profile when installing rustup for the first time, either interactively by choosing the “Customize installation” option or programmatically by passing the --profile=<name> flag. Profiles will only affect newly installed toolchains: as usual it will be possible to install individual components later with: rustup component add.