Rust Web Programming: A hands-on guide to developing, packaging, and deploying fully functional Rust web applications

Use the Rust programming language to build fully functional web applications with async Rust to amplify security and boost the performance of your programs

Key Features

• Work with cutting-edge web techniques such as distroless Rust servers, Terraform, and AWS deployment
• Get acquainted with async concepts such as actors and queuing tasks using lower-level frameworks like Tokio
• Build a full web application in Rust with a database, authentication, and frontend

Book Description

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications?

With this practical Rust book, you’ll discover how you can implement Rust on the web to achieve the desired performance and security as you learn techniques and tooling to build fully operational web apps.

In this second edition, you’ll get hands-on with implementing emerging Rust web frameworks, including Actix, Rocket, and Hyper. It also features HTTPS configuration on AWS when deploying a web application and introduces you to Terraform for automating the building of web infrastructure on AWS. What’s more, this edition also covers advanced async topics. Built on the Tokio async runtime, this explores TCP and framing, implementing async systems with the actor framework, and queuing tasks on Redis to be consumed by a number of worker nodes. Finally, you’ll go over best practices for packaging Rust servers in distroless Rust Docker images with database drivers, so your servers are a total size of 50Mb each.

By the end of this book, you’ll have confidence in your skills to build robust, functional, and scalable web applications from scratch.

What you will learn

• Structure and build scalable Rust web apps by creating a basic to-do list web app
• Manage authentication and databases in Rust web applications
• Get to grips with wrapping web applications in distroless
• Understand the building blocks of web development such as HTTPS, TCP, and middleware
• Build app infrastructure on AWS using Terraform with databases, servers, load balancers, HTTPS, and URL routing
• Build end-to-end tests using Postman
• Build async systems implementing the actor model using Tokio

Who this book is for

This Rust programming book is for web developers who want to learn and implement Rust to build web applications. Developers familiar with languages such as Python, Ruby, and JS will be able to use this book to build high performant web apps with Rust.

Although no prior experience in Rust is necessary, a solid understanding of web development principles, along with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is necessary to get the most out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. A Quick Introduction to Rust
2. Designing Your Web Application in Rust
3. Handling HTTP Requests
4. Processing HTTP Requests
5. Displaying Content in the Browser
6. Data persistence with PostgreSQL
7. Managing User Sessions
8. Building RESTful Services
9. Testing Our Application Endpoints and Components
10. Deploying Our Application on AWS
11. Configuring HTTPS with NGINX on AWS
12. Recreating Our Application in Rocket
13. Best Practices for a Clean Web App Repository
14. Exploring the Tokio Framework
15. Accepting TCP Traffic with Tokio
16. Building Protocols on Top of TCP
17. Implementing Actors and Async with the Hyper Framework
18. Queuing Tasks with Redis

Maxwell Flitton is a software engineer who works for the open source financial loss modeling foundation OasisLMF. In 2011, Maxwell achieved his Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from the University of Lincoln, UK. While working 12-hour shift s in the A&E departments of hospitals, Maxwell obtained another degree in physics from the Open University in the UK and then moved on to another milestone, with a postgraduate diploma in physics and engineering in medicine from UCL in London. He's worked on numerous projects such as medical simulation soft ware for the German government and supervising computational medicine students at Imperial College London. He also has experience in financial tech and Monolith AI.