Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By : Abhishek Chanda
Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By: Abhishek Chanda

Overview of this book

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications. This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography. After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Getting started with Rust

The Rust toolchain installer is available at: https://www.rustup.rs/. The following commands will install all three versions of the toolchain on a system. For the examples in this book, we will use a Linux machine running Ubuntu 16.04. While most of Rust should not depend on the OS, there can be minor differences.

We will point out any strict dependencies on the OS:

# curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
# source $HOME/.cargo/env
# rustup install nightly beta

We will need to put Cargo's bin directory to our PATH by editing .bashrc. Run the following to do that:

$ echo "export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

A Rust installation comes with a lot of documentation built in; they can be accessed by running the following command. This should open up the documentation in a browser window:

# rustup doc

The next step is to set up a...