Rust Quick Start

May 4, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Get up and running with BoxLite Rust crate in 5 minutes.

Installation

Requirements: Rust 1.88 or later

Add BoxLite to your project:

cargo add boxlite tokio futures --features tokio/macros,tokio/rt-multi-thread

Basic Execution

Create a file src/main.rs:

use boxlite::{BoxliteRuntime, BoxOptions, BoxCommand, RootfsSpec};
use futures::StreamExt;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Create runtime
    let runtime = BoxliteRuntime::default_runtime();

    // Create box
    let options = BoxOptions {
        rootfs: RootfsSpec::Image("alpine:latest".into()),
        ..Default::default()
    };
    let litebox = runtime.create(options, None).await?;

    // Execute command
    let mut execution = litebox
        .exec(BoxCommand::new("echo").arg("Hello from BoxLite!"))
        .await?;

    // Stream stdout
    let mut stdout = execution.stdout().unwrap();
    while let Some(line) = stdout.next().await {
        println!("{}", line);
    }

    Ok(())
}

Run it:

cargo run

From Source (Development)

For contributing or local development:

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/boxlite-ai/boxlite.git
cd boxlite

# Initialize submodules (critical!)
git submodule update --init --recursive

# Install platform dependencies
make setup

# Build
cargo build

# Run tests
cargo test

See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed build instructions.

Next Steps