RustRover with NixOS flakes

JetBrains RustRover is an IDE tailored for Rust development. On NixOS, rustup is difficult to work with, and in many cases with nix packages are slow to add new versions. For this reason its is easier to work with a flake in order to provide a reproducible toolchain (including rustc, cargo, rust-analyzer, clippy, rustfmt, and rust-src).

This article describes a way to set up rust-rover, such that it works with supported versions of rust.

Prerequisites

NixOS with flakes enabled
Basic familiarity with flakes and nix develop
A JetBrains account (RustRover requires a license, though free for some users)

Flake setup

The following flake defines a development shell with the Rust toolchain and common system dependencies:

{
  description = "Rust Rover environment";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    rust-overlay.url = "github:oxalica/rust-overlay";
    flake-utils = {
      url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, rust-overlay, flake-utils, ... }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let
        pkgs = import nixpkgs {
          inherit system;
          overlays = [ (import rust-overlay) ];
        };

        rustToolchain = pkgs.rust-bin.stable."1.88.0".default.override {
          extensions = [ "rust-src" "clippy" "rustfmt" ];
        };
      in {
        devShell = pkgs.mkShell {
          nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
            rustToolchain
          ];

          buildInputs = with pkgs; [
            openssl
            pkg-config

            rust-analyzer
            jetbrains.rust-rover
          ];

          shellHook = ''
            mkdir -p ~/.rust-rover/toolchain

            ln -sfn ${rustToolchain}/lib ~/.rust-rover/toolchain
            ln -sfn ${rustToolchain}/bin ~/.rust-rover/toolchain

            export RUST_SRC_PATH="$HOME/.rust-rover/toolchain/lib/rustlib/src/rust/library"
          '';
        };
      }
    );
}

Explanation

rust-overlay: Provides reproducible Rust toolchains in Nix
rustToolchain: Defines the Rust version and extensions (rust-src, clippy, rustfmt)
shellHook: Creates symlinks into $HOME so IDEs always see a stable path for cargo, rustc, and source libraries, even if the underlying Nix store path changes
RUST_SRC_PATH: Needed by some tools (e.g., rust-analyzer) to find the standard library sources

Using with RustRover

1. Enter the dev shell:

nix develop

2. Launch RustRover from inside the shell:

rust-rover

3. In RustRover:

Go to Settings → Rust
Rust rover only supports full paths, so set the toolchain location to:

/home/<username>/.rust-rover/toolchain/bin/

Then set the standard library path to:

/home/<username>/.rust-rover/toolchain/lib/rustlib/src/rust/library

Notes

You do not need rustup, the overlay provides pinned, reproducible Rust toolchains
Additional dependencies (OpenSSL, libGL, X11, etc.) can be added to buildInputs as required by your project
The symlink provides rust rover stable paths it can use.

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