diff.rs

Web application to view the difference between Rust crate versions. It is deployed at diff.rs.

How it works

It uses Yew as the reactive frontend framework, and Tailwind CSS for the styling.

The code in this repository compiles into a WebAssembly binary that runs in the browser. Since it only talks to the crates.io API, it does not need any backend and can be hosted statically.

The Architecture document explains the details of how it works.

How to launch it

You need a recent version of Rust, which is most easily installed with rustup.rs.

In addition, you will also need Trunk, which is a tool that helps to build Rust WebAssembly applications, and the WebAssembly build target for Rust. You can install it like this:

cargo install trunk
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

You can then use trunk to launch a local server with hot-reloading for development purposes:

trunk serve

You can also use it to build an optimized release version. This will place the build output into the dist folder. The --release flag enables some optimization, both building the Rust code in release mode, and running wasm-opt for further size savings. You might see a large speedup from running it this way.

trunk build --release

How it is deployed

It is currently hosted by GitLab Pages using this CI config. It serves the application statically, and uses both gzip and brotli compression for smaller assets and faster loading times.

The deployed version of it has privacy-preserving (cookie-less) analytics enabled to help me measure how many people are actively using it. If you have an adblocker, this is likely blocked by it. You can see the data here

See Deployment for more information on how this works.

How to contribute

Contributions to diff.rs are more than welcome. Feel free to check out the open issues for inspiration.

See Contributing for more information on how to contribute.

License