Project: Building a Simple Web Application

Apply what you've learned in Rust by building a simple web application. This project will cover setup, logic implementation, and finalization.

By Kevin McAleer,    2 Minutes

Introduction

Now that you’re familiar with Rust’s fundamentals, its concurrency model, error handling, and ecosystem, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice by building a simple web application. This project will guide you through setting up your project environment, implementing the application logic, and finalizing your project.

Learning Objectives

• Set up a Rust project for a web application.
• Implement basic web server logic using Rust.
• Finalize and run your web application.

Setting up

First, create a new Rust project:

cargo new rust_web_app
cd rust_web_app

Then, add necessary dependencies in your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
warp = "0.3"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }

We’ll use warp for the web server framework, tokio for asynchronous runtime, and serde for serializing and deserializing the JSON data.

Implementing Logic

Create a new file in the src directory called server.rs. Here, you will define your routes and request handlers. Start with a simple health check endpoint:

use warp::Filter;

async fn health_check() -> Result<impl warp::Reply, warp::Rejection> {
    Ok("OK")
}

pub fn routes() -> impl Filter<Extract = impl warp::Reply, Error = warp::Rejection> + Clone {
    warp::path!("health").and(warp::get()).and_then(health_check)
}

In your main.rs, set up the server to run:

use warp::Filter;

mod server;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    let routes = server::routes();

    warp::serve(routes).run(([127, 0, 0, 1], 3030)).await;
}

Finalizing the Project

Before running your application, review the code to ensure it follows best practices and that you’ve handled potential errors. Run your project:

cargo run

Test your application by visiting http://127.0.0.1:3030/health in a web browser or using a tool like curl:

curl http://127.0.0.1:3030/health

Summary

In this project, you’ve built a simple web application using Rust. You set up the project environment, implemented a basic web server, and learned how to run and test your Rust web application. This project serves as a foundation for building more complex web applications with Rust.