Download button

[hvenev]

I think it would be nice to have an easy way to download source tarballs from crates.io that are equivalent to what cargo uses.

[jtgeibel]

I think crates like cargo-clone and cargo-download are good, portable alternatives. We originally had a download button, but it was removed a long time ago (late 2014). While some platforms bundle support for gzipped tar files and auto-detect our file type, unfortunately some common platforms do not.

Also see #15 and #1219 for previous discussions.

[hvenev]

Right... there is no way to download cargo-clean or cargo-download without either cargo-clean or cargo-download.

What I'm trying to say is, downloading from crates.io should not require using cargo.

[jtgeibel]

You can install via cargo install cargo-clone (sorry, I had a typo in the previous comment). It's also possible to hit the API endpoint directly to download a crate, but it's not possible to provide a smooth, cross-platform experience without some client side code.