Introduction

Rocket is a web framework for Rust. If you’d like, you can think of Rocket as being a more flexible, friendly medley of Rails, Flask, Bottle, and Yesod. We prefer to think of Rocket as something new. Rocket aims to be fast, easy, and flexible. It also aims to be fun, and it accomplishes this by ensuring that you write as little code as needed to accomplish your task. This guide introduces you to the core, intermediate, and advanced concepts of Rocket. After reading this guide, you should find yourself being very productive with Rocket.

Audience

Readers are assumed to have a good grasp of the Rust programming language. Readers new to Rust are encouraged to read the Rust Book. This guide also assumes a basic understanding of web application fundamentals, such as routing and HTTP.

Foreword

Rocket’s design is centered around three core philosophies:

• Function declaration and parameter types should contain all the necessary information to validate and process a request. This immediately prohibits APIs where request state is retrieved from a global context. As a result, request handling is self-contained in Rocket: handlers are regular functions with regular arguments.

• All request handling information should be typed. Because the web and HTTP are themselves untyped (or stringly typed, as some call it), this means that something or someone has to convert strings to native types. Rocket does this for you with zero programming overhead.

• Decisions should not be forced. Templates, serialization, sessions, and just about everything else are all pluggable, optional components. While Rocket has official support and libraries for each of these, they are completely optional and swappable.

These three ideas dictate Rocket’s interface, and you will find all of them embedded in Rocket’s core features.