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Building Powerful GraphQL Servers with Rust

Ian Wilson on September 13, 2019

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash Setting up a GraphQL server with Rust, Juniper, Diesel, and Actix; learning about Rust's web frameworks and power...

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Victor Gonzalez • Sep 13 '19

This kind of articles are the ones that incites you to install a new tool and try some things out. 👌

Caleb Falcione • Sep 17 '19

Nice article!

In the Exposing the Schema section, just prior to running cargo build and navigating to localhost:8080/graphiql, I couldn't get main.rs to compile without changing

use crate::schema::{create_schema, Schema};

use graphql_schema::{create_schema, Schema};

Am I missing something?

Ian Wilson • Sep 17 '19

Ah thank you, you found an error in the snippet. I just changed it but you're correct, since the module is called graphql_schema we must refer to it like that.

Originally I had it called 'schema.rs' until I added the diesel integration (whose migrations overwrite whatever you have in schema.rs)

Caleb Falcione • Sep 19 '19

Another issue (you may be able to glean that I've been slowly working through the article over the past few days):
You don't seem to instruct adding the extern crate diesel; and mod schema; lines to main.rs. That prevented me from compiling after setting up diesel (immediately prior to adding the mutations).

Ian Wilson • Sep 20 '19

Thank you for being so thorough! I added another snippet at that point adding the imports. Hopefully that is the end of the errata - transpiling code from a project to an article in a digestible way comes with some struggles :D

Gerard Klijs • Sep 19 '19

Thanks, great article. Seems like soon they will also support subscriptions. Then I can finally 'use' it and compare to my Clojure implementation. Then one is 'stuck' at about 300 subscriptions/second hope for Rust to do better. Also there is github.com/tsegismont/graphql-serv..., maybe you can add a rust version?

Ian Wilson • Sep 20 '19

Yes - hopefully subscriptions will land soon, I saw your comment on that issue: github.com/graphql-rust/juniper/is.... Ah that's a pretty neat project, where is your Clojure implementation? I'll consider it, I too am interested in how it stacks up.

Gerard Klijs • Sep 20 '19

Haven't had the time yet. Preparing to speak at GraphQL Summit, polishing presentation and maybe make some improvements to the demo. I have github.com/openweb-nl/open-bank-mark but that's testing the Kafka backend more. Next iteration of that will focus on the GraphQL endpoint (and may in time have a rust variant for it).

Frank Panetta • Sep 21 '19

Great article! I have a repo that also uses these technologies together. Although it uses Diesel connection pool (R2D2) to connect to postgreSQL and passes the connection through to the Juniper GraphQL Context, to be accessed from the QueryRoot and MutationRoot.

i.e: #[juniper::object(Context = Context,)]

You probably already know how to hook all that up, but it took me ages to figure out. Just thought you might be interested. github.com/fattenap/actix-web-juni...

Anyway, thanks for the article, it really helped.

Barry⚡ • Jan 19 '20 • Edited

Got sad news, actix-web is dead. I hope the maintainer will not abandon it. Damn. Ian, will you update the article in the future using an alternative non-blocking framework? warp/gotham/tide/rocket any framework that you feel it can be used for a small production project? Thanks!

Ian Wilson • Jan 19 '20

I heard that in this post words.steveklabnik.com/a-sad-day-f.... I may create a new article and link to it from here. That sucks indeed, the library is a joy to use so I hope this won't be the end.

Barry⚡ • Jan 20 '20 • Edited

Update: actix-web is alive. Whew! Hope it won't happen again.

Source: github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/...

Ian Wilson • Jan 20 '20

That is great news! :D

Owen Craston • May 16 '20

Great tutorial. I am getting stuck on the diesel migrations. I used various DATABASE_URL and even looked at the diesel getting started guide where they said to use postgres://username:password@localhost/diesel_demo and everyone I run diesel setup I get

Creating database: garden_guru_server
fe_sendauth: no password supplied

and if I try to run diesel migration run I get
Err value: ConnectionError(BadConnection("fe_sendauth: no password supplied\n"))

Do you know why this could be ? I installed PostgreSQL with brew and thePGAdmin` seems to be working fine.

Sven Kanoldt • Sep 13 '19

Dope man! Well made 👏 👏 👏

Jacob Evans • Jul 20 '20

I ran across an issue with Actix with how the Response was structured inside of the web::block() moving the Response and Error construction outside resolved this for me. I found an issue related as well in their GH (github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/857)

Code Snippet of Changes

fn graphql(
    st: web::Data<Arc<Schema>>,
    data: web::Json<GraphQLRequest>,) -> impl Future<Item = HttpResponse , Error = error::Error>{
        web::block(move || {
            let res = data.execute(&st, &());
            Ok::<_,serde_json::error::Error>(serde_json::to_string(&res)?)
        }).map_err(Error::from)
        .and_then(|user| {
            Ok(HttpResponse::Ok()
        .content_type("application/json")
        .body(user))
        })
}