crate-names

Compact, transparent artifacts of every crate name on crates.io, rebuilt daily from the official database dump, for typeahead and default-version lookup. Plus a small sans-io Rust library for reading them.

The artifacts

Published daily to the rolling artifacts release:

Both are zstd-compressed TSV, one crate per line, sorted byte-wise by name, guaranteed sorted and (for names) three-fields-per-line by the builder. Because crate names cannot contain tabs or newlines, and description whitespace is flattened to single spaces, there is no escaping: the format is fully processable with standard tools.

$ curl -sL https://github.com/jbr/crate-names/releases/download/artifacts/names-v1.tsv.zst \
    | zstd -d | grep '^serde\b'
serde	1.0.228	240

• default_version is crates.io's own notion of the version to present, from the dump's default_versions table.
• rank is the all-time download count quantized to floor(8·log₂(n+1)), saturating at 255. Ordering is meaningful; arithmetic is not.
• Freshness: artifacts lag crates.io by up to ~27 hours (daily dump + daily build). Consumers that need same-day version resolution should fall through to the sparse index per crate.

The library

let names = crate_names::CrateNames::from_zstd(&bytes)?;

names.typeahead("serd", 10);   // top crates by rank for a prefix
names.get("serde");            // exact lookup: version + rank
names.prefix("serde");         // all matches, in name order

The reader is sans-io: fetch the artifact however you like and hand over the bytes. A sorted list needs no materialized index — construction records line offsets and validates sortedness, and queries are binary searches over the decompressed text.

The build feature (not needed by consumers) enables build_from_dump, which streams a db-dump.tar.gz and produces the artifacts; the daily workflow is a thin wrapper around it:

$ curl -sL https://static.crates.io/db-dump.tar.gz | crate-names build --out out

Versioning

The wire format and the library are versioned independently: the -v1 in the file names is the format contract, while the crate follows semver as usual. If the format ever changes incompatibly it will be published as new -v2 files alongside the -v1 ones, so existing consumers keep working.