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Intro to Gerust

Gerust provides an architecture and tooling for Rust backend projects. It takes care of the accidental complexity that comes with writing backends with Rust so you can stay focused on the essence of the system you're building:

  • Separating distinct parts of the system into separate crates
  • Organizing files into a logical folder structure
  • Maintaining and running database migrations
  • Isolating test cases that access the database
  • Tracing and error handling
  • and much more

For now, Gerust is just a project generator that creates the files and structure to get you started. There is no runtime dependency on Gerust – all the code that goes into your project remains under your control.

Architecture goes into more details about the reference architecture Gerust defines.

Installation​

Gerust can be installed with cargo:

cargo install gerust

There are no precompiled binaries available for Gerust at this point since working with Gerust requires a working Rust toolchain anyway.

Getting Started​

When getting started with Gerust, you need to decide whether your project is going to use a database or not.

Gerust calls projects that don't use a database, "minimal" projects. Those really are as simple as it gets: just a web server, functionality for reading in configuration if there is any, and CLI tooling for creating new controllers and other project files.

The other option is to create a standard project that uses a database. Standard projects also consist of a web server, functionality for reading in configuration, as well as CLI tooling for project management. In addition, they come with a bunch of additional concepts such as entity definitions, changesets, database access, and validations.

Minimal Projects​

Tutorial – Minimal Project shows how to create and work with a minimal project step-by-step.

Full Projects​

Tutorial – Full Project shows how to create and work with a full project. It creates a full task management system with authentication step-by-step.

What's a "Gerust"?​

"Gerust" is a play on "Gerüst", the German word for "framework" and Rust – thanks to @skade who had the idea originally and allowed us to use it!