Quickstart guide for a Rust HTTP server

In this quickstart guide, you’ll learn how to deploy an HTTP server on the Wasmer Edge. We will be using Rust’s popular Axum framework to create a simple HTTP server.

Prerequisites

The project requires the following tools to be installed on your system:

Deploying an HTTP Server

Install Wasmer

Click here for instructions on how to install Wasmer if you haven’t done it already!

Initialize the local directory

With the CLI installed, let’s create a new Axum application! We begin creating a new empty directory - after that, we will need to run a single command.


mkdir my-axum-server
cd my-axum-server

Then, let’s try to deploy using a axum template:


wasmer deploy --template=axum-starter

Which should give you output similar to this:


It seems you are trying to create a new app!
✔ Who should own this app? · wasmer-user
✔ What should be the name of the app? · axum-starter
✔ Unpacked template
 
NOTE: The selected template has a `BUILD.md` file.
This means there are likely additional build
steps that you need to perform before deploying
the app:
 
# Building the application
1. Install [WASIX](https://wasix.org/docs/language-guide/rust/installation)
2. Build the application: `cargo wasix build --release`
 
After taking the necessary steps to build your application, re-run `wasmer deploy`

You can see, as prompted by the command, that we’ll need a couple more steps before deploying the server, namely actually building the application. We assume you installed the WASIX toolchain. We need to build the HTTP server using cargo wasix:


cargo wasix build --release

Expect output like this:


...
Compiling wasmer-hello v0.1.0 (/.../Wasmer/edge-quickstart/wasmer-hello)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 10.69s
info: Post-processing WebAssembly files

🚨

It might happen that your build fails. This is due to different libraries that needs to be used to achieve WASIX compatibility: one of the easiest “gotchas” is forgetting to update your lock file with cargo update.

Deploy it

Now, Your directory structure should look like this:

- - main.rs
- Cargo.toml
- wasmer.toml
- app.yaml
- LICENSE
- README.md
- BUILD.md

Once the application itself was correctly built, you can re-run wasmer deploy:


 wasmer deploy

Expect to see output similar to this:


It seems you are trying to create a new app!
✔ Who should own this app? · <you> 
✔ What should be the name of the app? · <your-app-name> 
✔ Unpacked template
✔ Do you want to deploy the app now? · yes
Loading local package (manifest path: <current-working-directory>)
✔ Correctly built package locally
✔ Package correctly uploaded
✔ Succesfully pushed release to namespace <you> on the registry 
Deploying app <your-app-name> (<you>) to Wasmer Edge...
 
App <your-app-name> (<you>) was successfully deployed 🚀
https://<your-app-name>-<you>.wasmer.app
 
→ Unique URL: https://<app_id>.id.wasmer.app
→ Dashboard:  https://wasmer.io/apps/<you>/<your-app-name>
 
Waiting for new deployment to become available...
(You can safely stop waiting now with CTRL-C)
.
𖥔 Deployment complete

Let’s check it:


curl https://<your-app-name>-<you>.wasmer.app

Expect:


Hello, Axum ❤️ WASIX!

Test the server locally

We can test out server locally by running the following command:

Terminal 1	Terminal 2
wasmer-hello `wasmer run ./target/wasm32-wasmer-wasi/release/wasmer-hello.wasm --env PORT=3000 Listening on http://127.0.0.1:3000`	curl `$ curl http://localhost:3000 Hello, Axum ❤️ WASMER!`

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed an Axum server on Wasmer Edge 🚀.

Tip: To make changes to your Axum server, simply modify the main.rs file in the app directory and run wasmer deploy again to deploy the changes.

Resources

wasmer-examples/axum-wasmer-starter