# Overview Rocket provides primitives to build web servers and applications with Rust: Rocket provides routing, pre-processing of requests, and post-processing of responses; the rest is up to you. Your application code instructs Rocket on what to pre-process and post-process and fills the gaps between pre-processing and post-processing. ## Lifecycle Rocket's main task is to listen for incoming web requests, dispatch the request to the application code, and return a response to the client. We call the process that goes from request to response the "lifecycle". We summarize the lifecycle as the following sequence of steps: 1. **Routing** Rocket parses an incoming HTTP request into native structures that your code operates on indirectly. Rocket determines which request handler to invoke by matching against route attributes declared in your application. 2. **Validation** Rocket validates the incoming request against types and guards present in the matched route. If validation fails, Rocket _forwards_ the request to the next matching route or calls an _error handler_. 3. **Processing** The request handler associated with the route is invoked with validated arguments. This is the main business logic of an application. Processing completes by returning a `Response`. 4. **Response** The returned `Response` is processed. Rocket generates the appropriate HTTP response and sends it to the client. This completes the lifecycle. Rocket continues listening for requests, restarting the lifecycle for each incoming request. The remainder of this section details the _routing_ phase as well as additional components needed for Rocket to begin dispatching requests to request handlers. The sections following describe the request and response phases as well as other components of Rocket. ## Routing Rocket applications are centered around routes and handlers. A _route_ is a combination of: * A set of parameters to match an incoming request against. * A handler to process the request and return a response. A _handler_ is simply a function that takes an arbitrary number of arguments and returns any arbitrary type. The parameters to match against include static paths, dynamic paths, path segments, forms, query strings, request format specifiers, and body data. Rocket uses attributes, which look like function decorators in other languages, to make declaring routes easy. Routes are declared by annotating a function, the handler, with the set of parameters to match against. A complete route declaration looks like this: ```rust # #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene, decl_macro)] # #[macro_use] extern crate rocket; #[get("/world")] // <- route attribute fn world() -> &'static str { // <- request handler "hello, world!" } ``` This declares the `world` route to match against the static path `"/world"` on incoming `GET` requests. The `world` route is simple, but additional route parameters are necessary when building more interesting applications. The [Requests](../requests) section describes the available options for constructing routes. ## Mounting Before Rocket can dispatch requests to a route, the route needs to be _mounted_: ```rust # #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene, decl_macro)] # #[macro_use] extern crate rocket; # #[get("/world")] # fn world() -> &'static str { # "hello, world!" # } fn main() { rocket::ignite().mount("/hello", routes![world]); } ``` The `mount` method takes as input: 1. A _base_ path to namespace a list of routes under, here, `"/hello"`. 2. A list of routes via the `routes!` macro: here, `routes![world]`, with multiple routes: `routes![a, b, c]`. This creates a new `Rocket` instance via the `ignite` function and mounts the `world` route to the `"/hello"` path, making Rocket aware of the route. `GET` requests to `"/hello/world"` will be directed to the `world` function. ! note: In many cases, the base path will simply be `"/"`. ### Namespacing When a route is declared inside a module other than the root, you may find yourself with unexpected errors when mounting: ```rust,compile_fail # #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene, decl_macro)] # #[macro_use] extern crate rocket; mod other { #[get("/world")] pub fn world() -> &'static str { "Hello, world!" } } #[get("/hello")] pub fn hello() -> &'static str { "Hello, outside world!" } use other::world; fn main() { // error[E0425]: cannot find value `static_rocket_route_info_for_world` in this scope rocket::ignite().mount("/hello", routes![hello, world]); } ``` This occurs because the `routes!` macro implicitly converts the route's name into the name of a structure generated by Rocket's code generation. The solution is to refer to the route using a namespaced path instead: ```rust # #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene, decl_macro)] # #[macro_use] extern crate rocket; # #[get("/")] pub fn hello() {} # mod other { #[get("/world")] pub fn world() {} } rocket::ignite().mount("/hello", routes![hello, other::world]); ``` ## Launching Now that Rocket knows about the route, you can tell Rocket to start accepting requests via the `launch` method. The method starts up the server and waits for incoming requests. When a request arrives, Rocket finds the matching route and dispatches the request to the route's handler. We typically call `launch` from the `main` function. Our complete _Hello, world!_ application thus looks like: ```rust #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene, decl_macro)] #[macro_use] extern crate rocket; #[get("/world")] fn world() -> &'static str { "Hello, world!" } fn main() { # if false { rocket::ignite().mount("/hello", routes![world]).launch(); # } } ``` Note the `#![feature]` line: this tells Rust that we're opting in to compiler features available in the nightly release channel. This line **must** be in the crate root, typically `main.rs`. We've also imported the `rocket` crate and all of its macros into our namespace via `#[macro_use] extern crate rocket`. Finally, we call the `launch` method in the `main` function. Running the application, the console shows: ```sh 🔧 Configured for development. => address: localhost => port: 8000 => log: normal => workers: [logical cores * 2] => secret key: generated => limits: forms = 32KiB => keep-alive: 5s => tls: disabled 🛰 Mounting '/hello': => GET /hello/world (world) 🚀 Rocket has launched from http://localhost:8000 ``` If we visit `localhost:8000/hello/world`, we see `Hello, world!`, exactly as we expected. A version of this example's complete crate, ready to `cargo run`, can be found on [GitHub](@example/hello_world). You can find dozens of other complete examples, spanning all of Rocket's features, in the [GitHub examples directory](@example/).