% Package ID Specifications
# Package ID specifications
Subcommands of Cargo frequently need to refer to a particular package within a
dependency graph for various operations like updating, cleaning, building, etc.
To solve this problem, Cargo supports Package ID Specifications. A specification
is a string which is used to uniquely refer to one package within a graph of
packages.
## Specification grammar
The formal grammar for a Package Id Specification is:
```notrust
pkgid := pkgname
| [ proto "://" ] hostname-and-path [ "#" ( pkgname | semver ) ]
pkgname := name [ ":" semver ]
Here, brackets indicate that the contents are optional.
## Example specifications
These could all be references to a package `foo` version `1.2.3` from the
registry at `crates.io`
| `foo` | foo | * | * |
| `foo:1.2.3` | foo | 1.2.3 | * |
| `crates.io/foo` | foo | * | *://crates.io/foo |
| `crates.io/foo#1.2.3` | foo | 1.2.3 | *://crates.io/foo |
| `crates.io/bar#foo:1.2.3` | foo | 1.2.3 | *://crates.io/bar |
| `http://crates.io/foo#1.2.3` | foo | 1.2.3 | http://crates.io/foo |
## Brevity of specifications
The goal of this is to enable both succinct and exhaustive syntaxes for
referring to packages in a dependency graph. Ambiguous references may refer to
one or more packages. Most commands generate an error if more than one package
could be referred to with the same specification.