Rust Backend Tutorials Using Rocket

My goal is to be able to covert some of my website's flask backend into a rocket.rs backend without changing my templates by too much. Doing so will make me a more proficient Rust programmer and I'll also be able to churn out a couple videos doign so.

A helpful command to debug faster

cargo 2>cargo.log

cargo install cargo-watch
cargo watch -x run

Tutorials Outline

Rust Backend Development Part 1 - Creating an API Endpoint in Rocket

• Starting a Rocket project
• Variables including optional query variables
• Redirection
• URI Prefix for mounting
• Returning JSON
• Returning Two Responses

Rust Backend Development Part 2 - Making API Requests Inside Rocket Server

• Rocket.rs State introduction
• Client builder (user agent)
• Client blocking issues
• Result error handling
• Making request and getting Json or text within async context

Rust Backend Development Part 3 - JSON Manipulation

• How to create a Json response from scratch
• Talk about [de] serialization
• how to create Arbitrary Json
• how to use values in Json
• how to add values to Json
• how to error handle with requests

Rust Backend Development Part 4 - Caching Function Results in Rocket Server

• Lecture on concurrency in Rust
• Using RwLock to cache endpoint results
• Arc is for multi threaded memory safety
• Mutex is for read and write exclusive access
• RwLock is for write exclusive access if multiple reads is allowed
• If you don't want to create a new type for each response, you can use an LRU Cache with a time to live (TTL) for functions but this is not as performative
• For me: look into ignite fairing to update cached respones in the background.

Rust Backend Development Part 5 - Serding Structs and Organizing the Codebase

• Json serialize, deserialize, and manipulate Structs

• Splitting up features into different files

• Exporting routes and base paths from files

• Importing utils.rs in from files other than main.rs

• Specifying a port using Rocket.toml

  [debug]
  port = 2000

Rust Backend Development Part 6 - Templates, Forms, Static Files

• Templates

  • Use Tera since syntax is jinja2 meaning portability with Python
  • Creating a login page that extends a base template
  • Optimize your templates in the future by using the askama engine

• Processing form data with CSRF Protection

  • Provide fail safe routes by using rank

• Serving static files with path traversal protection

Rust Backend Development Part 7 - Integrating MongoDB

• Setting up MongoDB with Rocket
• Creating a REST API for blogging
  • new
  • edit
  • delete
  • posts
  • posts/id

Rust Backend Development Part 8 - Authentication & Rate Limiting

• Hashing password with bcrypt
• Creating a user API
  • Verifying if a user logged in correctly
  • bcrypt
• Verifying an admin user
• Authenticated routes
• Redirecting non-admins to the login page
• Creating a new user with MongoDB
• Rate limiting for security

Rust Backend Development Part 10 - Hybrid Frontend with Templates and Webapp

• Rendering the blog page
• Conditional rendering an edit button

Rust Backend Development Part 11 - Background Functions

Rust Backend Development Part 12 - Calling Python Script or Code from Within

• Switch over to Rust immediately while relying on Python for key features
• Website or app will maintain feature set and Rust is used with a shorter waiting period
• Rely on Rust cache and commands instead of Python's lru cache
• Jinja2 parsing conversion

Rust Backend Developer Part 13 - Production Deployment (DevOps)

• Create a secret key using openssl rand -base64 32 or with Python:

  >>> import secrets
  >>> secrets.token_urlsafe(32)