We've achieved our goals already with this series: we have a web service written in Rust, built into a Docker image with nix, with a nice dev shell, that we can deploy to fly.io.

But there's always room for improvement, and so I wanted to talk about a few things we didn't bother doing in the previous chapters.

There it is. The final installment.

Over the course of this series, we've built a very useful Rust web service that shows us colored ASCII art cats, and we've packaged it with docker, and deployed it to https://fly.io.

We did all that without using nix at all, and then in the last few chapters, we've learned to use nix, and now it's time to tell goodbye, along with this whole-ass :

I sold you on some additional functionality for catscii last chapter, and we got caught up in private registry / docker shenanigans, so, now, let's resume web development as promised.

We kinda left the locat crate stubby, it doesn't actually do any IP to location lookups. It doesn't even have a dependency on a crate that do that.

Wait wait wait, so we're not talking about nix yet?

Well, no! The service we have is pretty simple, and I want to complicate things a bit, to show how things would work in both the Dockerfile and the nix scenario.

And because I don't like contrived examples, we're going to do something somewhat real-world: we're going to geo-locate visitors, and track how many visits we get from each country.

Now that our service is production-ready, it's time to deploy it somewhere.

There's a lot of ways to approach this: what we are going to do, though, is build a docker image. Or, I should say, an OCI image.

This is still a series about Nix, but again: because the best way to see the benefits of Nix is to do it without Nix first, we'll use only Docker's tooling to build the image.

Our catscii program does everything we want it to do, except that it's a command-line application rather than a web server. Let's fix that.

The documentation for the axum crate tells us how to make a basic web server, and we honestly don't need much more than that.

So let's add axum:

amos@miles:~/catscii$ cargo add axum@0.6
    Updating crates.io index
      Adding axum =0.6 to dependencies.
             Features:
             + form
             + http1
             + json
             + matched-path
             + original-uri
             + query
             + tokio
             + tower-log
             - __private_docs
             - headers
             - http2
             - macros
             - multipart
             - w

Now that our development environment is all set up, let's make something useful!

From a VS Code window connected to our VM (as we just set up), let's make a new Rust project:

amos@miles:~$ cargo new catscii
     Created binary (application) `catscii` package

And open it in a new VSCode window: