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.

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.

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