Can I publish a crate that uses a patch?

Question

The section in the Rust documentation that talks about patching explains how to implement a patch, but all of the examples it uses are for "testing" and short term fixing. What I want to do is make a patch for one of the crates I depend on that bumps its sub-dependencies, and then I would then like to publish my crate with its patched dependencies on crates.io. However, when you create a patch you have to list a path dependency, as in the example:

[patch.crates-io]
uuid = { path = "../path/to/uuid" }

I assume this would prevent me from publishing my crate, since I now have a dependency on something not in crates.io.

So overall my question is: can I publish a crate to crates.io that uses a local patch? If not, is there another workaround for this situation?

Answer 1

It is not possible

Note: crates.io does not allow packages to be published with path dependencies (path dev-dependencies are ignored). See the Multiple locations section for a fallback alternative.

It is possible to specify both a registry version and a git or path location. The git or path dependency will be used locally (in which case the version is checked against the local copy), and when published to a registry like crates.io, it will use the registry version. Other combinations are not allowed.

You will need to have the dependency uploaded to crates.io.