Add an API endpoint for accessing the individual files of the crate (or at least Cargo.toml)

[JohnScience]

I would like to have programmatic access to Cargo.toml to fetch their [package.metadata.*] so that mdbook can have a well-supported add command (see rust-lang/mdBook#163 (comment)).

From https://users.rust-lang.org/t/how-to-see-the-code-for-crate-published-in-crate-io/1897 I know that with https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/<crate-name>/<crate-semver>/download I can download an archive with the source code. However, it seems wasteful.

Neither of

• https://github.com/theduke/crates-io-api
• https://github.com/hcpl/crates.io-http-api-reference

offer the thing I would want.

[LawnGnome]

Just speaking for myself here, not for the team, but I don't think I'd want to add this to the crates.io API: crates.io isn't privileged in any way in terms of accessing crates (we'd have to download the crate file from S3 and extract it, just like anyone else), and it doesn't feel like something that is worth spending our limited resources on, since it's something anyone can do.

Open to any other opinions from the team here, but my inclination would be to close this as unplanned. Sorry.

[eth3lbert]

Yeah, and if you want to view the content online, there are at least two ways I know of:

1. The source page on docs.rs (e.g., https://docs.rs/crate/mdbook-linkcheck/latest/source/Cargo.toml)
2. From diff.rs, which downloads and decompresses the content on the fly! (e.g., https://diff.rs/mdbook-linkcheck/0.7.7/0.7.7/Cargo.toml/)

[JohnScience]

Thanks for the answer.