rust-analyzer-cli

Compiler-accurate Rust codebase navigation powered by rust-analyzer LSP and an embedded HTTP daemon.

rust-analyzer-cli is dual-structured as both a CLI tool and a Rust Library (rust_analyzer_cli), enabling developers, automation tools, and Rust programs to perform fast, compiler-accurate symbol search, document outline extraction, definition lookup, and Rust semantic navigation.

Features

🚀 Background Daemon & Persistent LSP Session: Spawns rust-analyzer via JSON-RPC stdio and serves an embedded Axum HTTP REST server (default port 60094).
🔍 Workspace Symbol Search: Search for structs, enums, functions, traits, and variables across the entire workspace.
📜 Document Outline: Extract hierarchical document symbol outlines for any .rs file.
🎯 Go to Definition: Jump directly to exact symbol definitions by file, line, and column.
💬 Hover Documentation: Read Rust type information and /// documentation at a file position.
📞 Semantic Navigation: Query symbol references and incoming/outgoing calls with explicit agent-oriented commands.
🧩 Rust Relations: Query implementation locations with the Rust-native relations --mode implementations command.
🤖 Automation Friendly: Supports human-readable CLI outputs and --json structured formatting.

Installation

Requirements

Rust and Cargo
rust-analyzer available in PATH
The rust-src and rust-analyzer rustup components

rust-src is required for standard-library documentation and source lookup. An IDE extension alone does not provide the rust-analyzer command used by the daemon.

Install and Initialize

From the target project workspace:

rustup component add rust-src rust-analyzer
cargo install rust-analyzer-cli
rust-analyzer-cli init-skill --workspace .

For repository development, use cargo run -- ... instead of a stale binary. For compiler diagnostics, use the official cargo check command directly.

As a Rust Library

Add rust_analyzer_cli to your project's Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
rust_analyzer_cli = "0.7.0"

Common Usage

Start the daemon from the target workspace root before querying:

rust-analyzer-cli daemon --workspace .
rust-analyzer-cli status

Common queries include hover, definition, body, outline, symbol, references, calls, and relations. For example:

rust-analyzer-cli hover --file src/main.rs --line 15 --col 10
rust-analyzer-cli definition --file src/main.rs --line 15 --col 10 --body
rust-analyzer-cli references --file src/main.rs --line 25 --col 8
rust-analyzer-cli calls --file src/main.rs --line 25 --col 8 --direction incoming
rust-analyzer-cli calls --file src/main.rs --line 25 --col 8 --direction outgoing --depth 2
rust-analyzer-cli relations --file src/main.rs --line 25 --col 8 --mode implementations

Input paths are relative to the workspace used to start the daemon. Line and column numbers are 1-based; columns count UTF-16 code units to match LSP. Use --json for machine-readable output. For exact options, defaults, coordinate rules, daemon requirements, and examples, use:

rust-analyzer-cli --help
rust-analyzer-cli <command> --help

Using as a Rust Library

You can embed the HTTP server or interact with data types directly in your Rust applications:

use rust_analyzer_cli::daemon::server::start_daemon_server;
use rust_analyzer_cli::lsp::types::*;
use std::path::PathBuf;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let workspace = PathBuf::from(".");
    let port = 60094;

    // Start daemon server asynchronously
    tokio::spawn(async move {
        start_daemon_server(workspace, port).await.unwrap();
    });

    Ok(())
}

Project Skill

The navigation skill definition is included at .agents/skills/rust-codebase-navigation/SKILL.md. The init-skill command copies it into any project workspace.

For a project that already has this repository checked out, initialize the skill with Cargo during development:

cargo run -- init-skill --workspace .

For a globally installed binary, use rust-analyzer-cli init-skill --workspace . as shown above.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.

rust-analyzer-cli 0.7.0