🚲 Bike Stations API Backend with 🦀 Rust and 🪳 CockroachDB

A small project to demonstrate how a back-end service for managing bike stations could be implemented using Rust and CockroachDB.

📃 Project characteristics

The most important crates this projects uses are:

Axum - Creates the web server and routes the endpoint handlers.
SQLx - Connects with the CockroachDB, providing compile-time query validation.
Tokio - Provides the async runtime.
Reqwest - HTTP client used to retrieve data to be ingested from the GBFS JSON files.

SeaORM was considered to manage the database, but I dropped it because found datatype issues with CockroachDB. Diesel was also considered but had a steeper learning curve.

Structure

src/ - Contains all Rust code.
- main.rs - Runs the async Tokio main and registers Axum endpoints.
- handler/
  - stations.rs - Defines the functions attached to the endpoints, plus some helper functions. These write to the DB directly.
- model/
  - gbfs.rs - Defines the struct representing the GBFS JSON file used as request body in /ingest
  - stations.rs - Defines structs mapping the database tables and JSON objects coming from GBFS URLs
sql/ - Contains the database configuration
- setup_db.sql - Creates the database and tables. Useful to restore the DB.

🏃 Running the project

Clone this repo, and run

git clone https://github.com/strosek/bike-stations.git
cd bike-stations
docker compose up --build

Then you can call the service at port 3000:

curl -v -X POST localhost:3000/ingest -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data {<GBFS requset body here>}
curl -v -X GET localhost:3000/stations

To reset the database stop the containers and run them again:

docker compose down
docker compose up

🚀 Future improvements

This project was created from scratch with a 4-hours coding time limit without much familiarity with the crates used. This left a lot to be done to bring the app to production quality. Among the most important improvements to be done are: