My shot at RESTful Microservices in Rust - Part 1

Part 1 - Getting started

So I'm starting my own tech blog, and the first topic I'd like to cover is Rust, or more specifically, how I go about building a RESTful microservice in Rust. Bear in mind that this is not a tutorial, it's me telling the story of how I went about it what I think about the result.

I'll name this PoC project rest-battleship, because a lot of my experiments with the Rust language have been about this classic game, for reasons. The complete code can be found on GitHub.

What's to be done?

The minimum requirements I have for this PoC are

• A JSON API
• REST- and meaningful responses, i.e. using appropriate HTTP response codes
• Database interaction

Part 1 will cover setting up the project and getting a minimal HTTP service up and running.

Setting up the project

For this project I'll be using Rust 1.15.1, being the latest stable release at the time of writing. If you haven't got Rust installed yet, it's a breeze with rustup. Version 1.15 has been a kind of milestone for Rust, as a long-awaited feature as become stable: custom derive. Custom derive allows you to create macros that can be used in Rust's #[derive()] attribute. This means you can finally generate custom code for structs on the stable branch of the language.

So cargo new --bin rest-battleship creates the project with a Cargo.toml file to describe the thing and a src/main.rs that will print 'Hello, world!' - easy!

A minimal HTTP service

Okay, so the next step is to find a framework that let's us serve HTTP requests. There are several ones available and I've chosen nickel for this PoC. So let's add this dependency to Cargo.toml:

[package]
name = "rest-battleship"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["René Perschon <notmyemail@gmail.com>"]
 
[dependencies]
nickel = "0.9.0"

And then change src/main.rs to start a server and listen on port 8080:

#[macro_use] extern crate nickel;
 
use nickel::Nickel;
use nickel::HttpRouter;
 
fn main() {
    let mut server = Nickel::new();
    server.get("/games", middleware! {|_req, _resp|
        "Hello, world!"
    });
    server.listen("0.0.0.0:8080").expect("Error starting server");
}

Start the service with cargo run and that's enough to cURL http://localhost:8080/games and receive a greeting to the whole world.

This concludes part 1 of the PoC. In part 2 I will cover basic database interaction.