Building a Web App with Rust, Rocket, and Diesel
Rust has been voted the most loved programming language in the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey for seven years in a row. Its focus on safety, performance, built-in memory management, and concurrency make it an excellent choice for building web applications. In this article, we’ll explore how to create a web app using Rust, Rocket, and Diesel.
What is Rocket?
Rocket is a Rust web framework that provides built-in tools for creating efficient and secure web apps. It’s designed to be flexible, usable, and maintainable, with a clean and simple syntax. Rocket allows you to use object-relational mappers (ORMs) as a data access layer for your application.
What is Diesel?
Diesel is a popular Rust ORM that supports SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL databases. It provides a high-level interface for interacting with your database, making it easy to perform common operations like creating, reading, updating, and deleting data.
Setting up the Project
To get started, create a new Rust Binary-based application with Cargo:
bash
cargo new blog --bin
This will generate a blog directory with the following structure:
markdown
blog/
Cargo.toml
src/
main.rs
Next, add Diesel, Rocket, and other dependencies to the Cargo.toml file:
toml
[dependencies]
diesel = { version = "1.4.4", features = ["postgres"] }
rocket = "0.5.0-rc.1"
serde = { version = "1.0.130", features = ["derive"] }
dotenvy = "0.15.0"
Configuring the Database
Create a .env file and add your database connection string:
makefile
DATABASE_URL=postgres://username:password@localhost/database
Then, run the following command to set up the database:
bash
diesel setup
This will create a diesel.toml file with the necessary configurations.
Creating a Migration
Create a migration to create a posts table:
bash
diesel migration generate posts
This will generate a up.sql file with the following content:
sql
CREATE TABLE posts (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
content TEXT NOT NULL
);
Running the Migration
Run the migration to create the posts table:
bash
diesel migration run
Building the Rocket Model
Create a models directory and a post.rs file:
“`rust
//