The Rusty Paper

A ready out of the box RESTful API for creating and sharing text content that you can host yourself, in Rust.

Table of Content

• Development Run
  • Run Using Docker Compose
  • Run Using Cargo and SQLx CLI
• Production Run
• Configuration
  • _FILE Format

Development Run

You can either run the application locally in a docker container or run it using Cargo and SQLx CLI. Either way will be OK if you want to work in a development environment.

Run Using Docker Compose

If you have Docker and Docker Compose installed, the process for a development run is straight forward.

Simply rename the .env.example file to .env and fill in the environment variables, then do

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yaml up --detach

Docker Compose uses the database related configuration that you provide in .env to create a PostgreSQL instance. The application container then tries to connect to the database and set it up automatically.

Run Using Cargo and SQLx CLI

Make sure you have SQLx CLI installed and an instance of the PostgreSQL database running.

Again rename the .env.example file to .env and fill in the environment variables.

You can then setup the database using SQLx

cargo sqlx database setup

then run using cargo

cargo run

or you can do a release run

cargo run --release

Production Run

Running in a production environment needs some sort of secret delivery strategy. To keep things simple for a more casual use, a basic docker-compose.prod.yaml has been provided for usage with Docker Swarm mode. You need to provide you own secrets using the _FILE format of environment variables.

Configuration

The app allows for some configuration mostly database related:

• DATABASE_URL: The standard database specific connection string, used by SQLx to setup and migrate the database. Something like

DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@host:port/database-name

should work for PostgreSQL.

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_USER: PostgreSQL Database user for authentication.

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_HOST: The host in which PostgreSQL instance is running.

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_PORT: The app tries to connect to PostgreSQL on this port. If you are running the application using Docker Compose leave the port on 5432.

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_PASSWORD: Password for the provided PostgreSQL user.

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_NAME: Name of the app database.

• RUSTYPAPER_AUTH_SHARED_SECRET_KEY: This is the Base64 encoded secret that application uses to encrypt the shared secrets. It is recommended to use a key of length 512 bits (64 bytes) or more. If you are unsure of to how to generate this key, you can use OpenSSL Toolkit to help you generate 64 random bytes and Base64 encode them:

openssl rand -base64 64 | tr -d '\n'

• RUSTYPAPER_COOKIE_KEY: The key to use with private cookies. This key too must be at lease 64 bytes long. You can generate the key in a similar way to generating RUSTYPAPER_AUTH_SHARED_SECRET_KEY.

_FILE Format

Currently this is only supported by

• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_USER
• RUSTYPAPER_DATABASE_PASSWORD
• RUSTYPAPER_AUTH_SHARED_SECRET_KEY
• RUSTYPAPER_COOKIE_KEY

By appending a _FILE to the end of these environment variables, a file is expected to hold its value.