Rouille, Rust web server middleware

Documentation

Link to WIP book

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

FAQ

But I'm used to express-like frameworks!

Instead of doing this: (pseudo-code)

server.add_middleware(function() {
    // middleware 1
});

server.add_middleware(function() {
    // middleware 2
});

server.add_middleware(function() {
    // middleware 3
});

In rouille you just handle each request entirely manually:

// initialize everything here

rouille::start_server(..., move |request| {
    // middleware 1

    // middleware 2

    // middleware 3
});

What about performances?

The state of async I/O, green threads, coroutines, etc. in Rust is still blurry.

The rouille library just ignores this optimization and focuses on providing an easy-to-use synchronous API instead, where each request is handled in its own dedicated thread.

Even if rouille itself was asynchronous, you would need asynchronous database clients and asynchronous file loading in order to take advantage of it. There are currently no such libraries in the Rust ecosystem.

Once async I/O has been figured out, rouille will be (hopefully transparently) updated to take it into account.

Are there plugins for features such as database connection, templating, etc.

It should be trivial to integrate a database or templates to your web server written with rouille. Moreover plugins need maintenance tend to create a dependency hell. It is generally just better not to use plugins.

How do you know there is no defect in the API?

I'm using this library to rewrite an existing medium-sized website.