I need to patch Cargo.lock but when I do the build fails

Dependency crates are vendored by reading Cargo.lock at evaluation time and not at build time. Thus using patches = [ ./patch-which-updates-lockfile.patch ]; may result in a situation where any new crates introduced by the patch cannot be found by cargo.

It is possible to work around this limitation by patching Cargo.lock in a stand-alone derivation and passing that result to vendorCargoDeps before building the rest of the workspace.

let
  patchedCargoLock = src = pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation {
    src = ./path/to/Cargo.lock;
    patches = [
      ./update-cargo-lock.patch
    ];
    installPhase = ''
      runHook preInstall
      mkdir -p $out
      cp Cargo.lock $out
      runHook postInstall
    '';
  };
in
craneLib.buildPackage {
  cargoVendorDir = craneLib.vendorCargoDeps {
    src = patchedCargoLock;
  };

  src = craneLib.cleanCargoSource (craneLib.path ./.);

  patches = [
    ./update-cargo-lock.patch
    ./some-other.patch
  ];
}