Create A Live Reload HTTP Terminal Client To Monitor axum Development In Rust

I'm working on my cauldron web server. I found this cool way to setup a terminal client that makes calls to it during development that shows responses. It's super handy. No more manually refreshing a browser to see changes.

The Code

Code

[package]
name = "axum_dev_watch"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

[dependencies]
tokio = {version = "1", features = ["full"] }
axum = "0.6"

[dev-dependencies]
anyhow = "1"
httpc-test = "0.1.1"

Code

use anyhow::Result;

#[tokio::test]
async fn monitor() -> Result<()> {
    let client = httpc_test::new_client("http://localhost:8181")?;
    client.do_get("/").await?.print().await?;
    Ok(())
}

Code

use axum::response::IntoResponse;
use axum::routing::get;
use axum::{response::Html, Router};
use std::net::SocketAddr;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    let index_route = Router::new().route("/", get(index_handler));
    let addr = SocketAddr::from(([127, 0, 0, 1], 8181));
    axum::Server::bind(&addr)
        .serve(index_route.into_make_service())
        .await
        .unwrap();
}

async fn index_handler() -> impl IntoResponse {
    println!("Got request for /");
    Html("Hello, world")
}

The Usage

Code

cargo watch -q -c -x "test -q monitor -- --nocapture"

Code

cargo watch -q -c -w src/ -x run

The Example

When the monitor process runs, it'll produce output like:

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s


running 1 test

=== Response for GET http://localhost:8181/
=> Status         : 200 OK OK
=> Headers        :
   content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
   content-length: 12
   date: Thu, 07 Sep 2023 22:50:48 GMT
=> Response Body  :
Hello, world
===


test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

Notes

I'm doing this with axum in this example. The tool is client side though. It can run against other backends as well.

References

Rust Axum Full Course
Jeremy Chone