Iron 
Extensible, Concurrency Focused Web Development in Rust.
Response Timer Example
struct ResponseTime;
impl Key for ResponseTime { type Value = u64 }
impl BeforeMiddleware for ResponseTime {
fn before(&self, req: &mut Request) -> IronResult<()> {
// Set the current time for retrieval later.
req.extensions.insert::<ResponseTime>(precise_time_ns());
Ok(())
}
fn catch(&self, req: &mut Request, _: &mut IronError) {
// On an error just do the same thing.
let _ = self.before(req);
}
}
impl AfterMiddleware for ResponseTime {
fn after(&self, req: &mut Request, res: Response) -> IronResult<Response> {
// Get the time we set earlier, compare it to now.
let delta = precise_time_ns() - *req.extensions.find::<ResponseTime>().unwrap();
println!("Request took: {} ms", (delta as f64) / 1000000.0);
Ok(res)
}
fn catch(&self, req: &mut Request, _: &mut IronError) {
let delta = precise_time_ns() - *req.extensions.find::<ResponseTime>().unwrap();
// Print something different on errors.
println!("Request errored, and took: {} ms", (delta as f64) / 1000000.0);
}
}
fn main() {
// Create our Handler
let chain = Chain::new(|&: _: &mut Request| {
// Send back 200, "Hello World"
Ok(Response::with((status::Ok, "Hello World!")))
});
// Add our response timer.
chain.link((ResponseTime, ResponseTime));
// Kick off serving.
Iron::new(chain).http("localhost:3000").unwrap();
}Overview
Iron is a high level web framework built in and for Rust, built on hyper. Iron is designed to take advantage of Rust's greatest features - its excellent type system and its principled approach to ownership in both single threaded and multi threaded contexts.
Iron is highly concurrent and can scale horizontally on more machines behind a load balancer or by running more threads on a more powerful machine. Iron avoids the bottlenecks encountered in highly concurrent code by avoiding shared writes and locking in the core framework.
Iron is 100% safe code:
$ ack unsafe src | wc
0 0 0Philosophy
Iron is meant to be as extensible and pluggable as possible; Iron's core is concentrated and avoids unnecessary features by leaving them to middleware, plugins, and modifiers.
Middleware, Plugins, and Modifiers are the main ways to extend Iron with new functionality. Most extensions that would be provided by middleware in other web frameworks are instead addressed by the much simpler Modifier and Plugin systems.
Modifiers allow external code to manipulate Requests and Response in an ergonomic fashion, allowing third-party extensions to get the same treatment as modifiers defined in Iron itself. Plugins allow for lazily-evaluated, automically cached extensions to Requests and Responses, perfect for parsing, accessing, and otherwise lazily manipulating an http connection.
Middleware are only used when it is necessary to modify the control flow of a Request flow, hijack the entire handling of a Request, check an incoming Request, or to do final post-processing. This covers areas such as routing, mounting, static asset serving, final template rendering, authentication, and logging.
Iron comes with only basic modifiers for setting the status, body, and various headers, and the infrastructure for creating modifiers, plugins, and middleware. No plugins or middleware are bundled with Iron.
Performance
Iron averages 84,000+ requests per second for hello world and is mostly IO-bound, spending over 70% of its time in the kernel send-ing or recv-ing data.*
* Numbers from profiling on my OS X machine, your milage may vary.
Core Extensions
Iron aims to fill a void in the Rust web stack - a high level framework that is extensible and makes organizing complex server code easy.
Extensions are painless to build, and the core bundle already includes*:
Middleware:
Plugins:
Both:
This allows for insanely flexible and powerful setups and allows nearly all
of Iron's features to be swappable - you can even change the middleware
resolution algorithm by swapping in your own Chain.
* Due to the rapidly evolving state of the Rust ecosystem, not everything builds all the time. Please be patient and file issues for breaking builds, we're doing our best.
Underlying HTTP Implementation
Iron is based on and uses hyper as its
HTTP implementation, and lifts several types from it, including its header
representation, status, and other core HTTP types. It is usually unnecessary to
use hyper directly when using Iron, since Iron provides a facade over
hyper's core facilities, but it is sometimes necessary to depend on it as
well.
Installation
If you're using Cargo, just add Iron to your Cargo.toml:
[dependencies.iron]
version = "*"Documentation
The documentation is hosted online and
auto-updated with each successful release. You can also use cargo doc to
build a local copy.
Examples
Check out the examples directory!
You can run an individual example using cargo run --example example-name.
Note that for benchmarking you should make sure to use the --release flag,
which will cause cargo to compile the entire toolchain with optimizations.
Without --release you will get truly sad numbers.
Getting Help
Feel free to ask questions as github issues in this or other related repos.
The best place to get immediate help is on IRC, on any of these channels on the mozilla network:
#rust-webdev#iron#rust
One of the maintainers or contributors is usually around and can probably help. We encourage you to stop by and say hi and tell us what you're using Iron for, even if you don't have any questions. It's invaluable to hear feedback from users and always nice to hear if someone is using the framework we've worked on.
Maintainers
Jonathan Reem (reem) is the core maintainer and author of Iron.
Commit Distribution (as of 8e55759):
Jonathan Reem (415)
Zach Pomerantz (123)
Michael Sproul (9)
Patrick Tran (5)
Corey Richardson (4)
Bryce Fisher-Fleig (3)
Barosl Lee (2)
Christoph Burgdorf (2)
da4c30ff (2)
arathunku (1)
Cengiz Can (1)
Darayus (1)
Eduardo Bautista (1)
Mehdi Avdi (1)
Michael Sierks (1)
Nerijus Arlauskas (1)
SuprDewd (1)
License
MIT