askama VS Rouille, Rust web server middleware

I have inlined the CSS here, and you can use Rust-based tooling like Lightning CSS to minify and bundle CSS here. You might also want to create a Rust build script to generate the HTML from a template, using the askama crate (works a little like Jinja).

This adds askama itself as well as the Responder trait implementation for the askama::Template type. askama expects your files to be in a subfolder of the project root called templates by default, so let's create the folder and then create an index.html file with the following HTML code in:

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

This is such a great project, thank you for sharing! It seems like you're getting the usual dump of negativity around HTMX... but as usual, not much coming from anyone who's actually tried to build something small/medium-sized. I keep hearing that this stack "would" fall apart in a bigger project, but I never hear any concrete, empirical descriptions of issues that actually do arise.

I'll offer one here... using HTMX usually means you're going to be writing HTML templates, and HTML templating languages don't have much IDE support. I really miss goto-definition etc. when I'm writing Jinja templates.

That being said, I've personally found Rust/HTMX to be a magnificent combo. I personally find writing backend endpoints in Rust to be no more cumbersome than any other language (after becoming comfortable with Rust)... and there's massive gains from the incredible tooling and type system.

I wonder if you've considered using Askama for your templates? It has a Axum integration that cleans up some of the boilerplate around template rendering. There's also an open PR for block fragments [1], which will make componentization of HTML fragments much easier, as discussed in this essay on the HTMX site [2].

We need more projects like this to demonstrate how useful, highly-interactive apps are made with HTMX. I'd encourage skeptics to try the same before writing it off.

[1] https://github.com/djc/askama/pull/824

This templating languge / engine is heavily inspired by Askama, but brings more rust into your template code. The project is still in early stages and is likely filled with bugs but I wanted to get something out there to get some feedback on.

Askama

Rust allows me to mainly only run the application to confirm things work from a business perspective.

For people starting out building stuff in rust - understand that there is a distinction of async code and libraries and can lead to confusing compiler errors if you don't realize there is a distinction. It's simple in hindsight but did cause me to waste hours barking up the wrong trees at first. Other wise just learn about `match` and Result/Option types asap, they're fundamental.

https://github.com/http-rs/tide tide is great to create an http server / routes

https://github.com/djc/askama I use this to template out HTML and it checks all my boxes, dynamic data, passing in functions, control flow.

https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx sql interface for a variety of backend, async safe.

https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest http client to make requests

Rust is amazing, don't let the initial few speed bumps discourage you - building real things with rust is no more challenging today than any other modern language stack.

I also Suggest using https://crates.io/crates/askama for Templates. even though it can be hard to get use to and they are compile time only It allows you to use Rust functions directly within the Template code. Which can make your life easier.

It was a bug in askama that was fixed. The solution is to use a newer version that contains the fix, but they have not released a new version of askama since fixing the bug, so 0.11.1 still contains the bug. It seems like 0.12 has been a long time coming but should finally be coming soon: https://github.com/djc/askama/issues/722

A good example is Askama, which should look good to folk from the python / django / jinja world: https://github.com/djc/askama

Your CRUD web application server almost certainly doesn't need async Rust. Using a blocking HTTP server is not "might be a good idea", it simply is a good idea.

I recommend Rouille for this: https://github.com/tomaka/rouille. In case you are worried about performance, check the benchmark. Blocking Rouille is faster than builtin async server in Node.js.

As you say, the majority of the web ecosystem in Rust has moved to async - but if you’re happy to stray a bit from the beaten path then rouille might do the trick.

In strongly typed languages like Rust, composing smaller libraries is usually quite painless, so you don't need a large framework.

Personally for backend Rust I use rouille[0] for the server (it's very simple and async-free), askama[1] for compile-time HTML templates and (if a SPA is unavoidable, as that is of course always to be avoided if at all possible) yew[2] for client-side WASM.

Now this stack is what I like personally, but there are many options that you can combine, some more full-featured than others. Check out https://www.arewewebyet.org/ for a partial overview.

[0]: https://github.com/tomaka/rouille

[1]: https://github.com/djc/askama

[2]: https://yew.rs/

rouille

I'd like to put in a word for a simple, sync framework such as rouille. The compile times are much, much better, the number of dependencies is much smaller, the stuff it's built on (the standard library) is extensively tested and extremely reliable. Kernel context switches are slower than userspace thread scheduling, but not much slower, and as long as your services aren't just shoving bytes from one place to another (i.e. actually doing some computation) the time taken for a context switch vanishes into noise. A lot of benchmarks test how quickly a web service can move bytes, which (if your business logic is non-trivial) actually isn't the most critical factor.

I don't have any Rust-relevant experience here, but if I wanted to build a web server in Rust and was okay with "reasonable" performance, I'd probably give rouille a try first.

Rouille is fairly solid in my experience. Save the pain of async and spend it building software that works. Honestly with Rust's lack of GC you get predictable response times already.

How would you differentiate it from let's say Rouille ?