Rust Backend Tutorials Using Actix

Previously, this tutorial was off of Rocket.rs, however issues such as CSRF have hindered the tutorials and improvements in Actix usability has convinced me to start using Actix.

My goal is to be able to covert some of my website's flask backend into a Actix 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

Troubleshooting

process didn't exit successfully: C:\Users\maste\Documents\GitHub\rust-backend-tutorials\target\debug\build\ring-a1678af766c289b9\build-script-build (exit code: 101)

To fix this, make sure you have Visual Studio installed, and run this command. You may also need to install the MSVC version of rust.

rustup override set stable-msvc

Tutorials Actix

Tutorials Rocket.rs

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)