Reading Rust documentation offline

The book & standard library docs

If you installed Rust using rustup, there should be a copy on your local filesystem of the narrative documentation and the API docs for the standard library, which are also at https://doc.rust-lang.org.

To open the Rust Programming Language book in your default browser:

rustup doc --book

To browse the stdlib API docs:

rustup doc --std

To look up the docs for a specific item:

rustup doc std::string::String

To open any of these in a different browser, pass the path on the filesystem, e.g.:

w3m $(rustup doc --path --std)

See rustup doc -h for the flags to view the other books (the Cargo Book, the Rustonomicon, etc.).

Other crates

To view the API docs for a dependency library locally, rather than going to https://docs.rs, you can generate the docs for your project with cargo doc. If you don’t pass the --no-deps flag, the docs for your dependencies will also get written to target/doc/{library}/. E.g.:

echo 'rand = "0.8.3"' >> Cargo.toml
cargo doc --offline
w3m target/doc/rand/index.html