[danaliv]

I tried to build a simple Rust "hello world" + database web app the other day (edit: not with Rocket) and after four hours I had nothing to show for it. I had a simple static app in just a few minutes, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to maintain state like a database connection pool and make it available to request handlers in any sane and maintainable way. (There are ways to do it insanely and unmaintainably for sure.) Has anyone else had this experience?

[sbenitez]

Thanks for trying out Rocket! There are a couple of examples in Rocket's repository that illustrate how to use Rocket with a database. The more complete of the two is the todo example [0]. This uses Diesel as its ORM alongside managed state to maintain a pool of database connections. The second example of the two uses raw SQLite without a connection pool [1]. It's meant to be a bare bones illustration of using a database with Rocket.

Managed state is a feature specifically designed to help with this kind of thing. That being said, I still think Rocket can do more to abstract away database connections. I'm tracking improvements on this front in GitHub issue #167 [2].

[0]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/tree/master/examples...

[1]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/blob/master/examples...

[2]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/issues/167

[danaliv]

Thanks so much for the helpful reply! I should've noted that I haven't actually tried Rocket. :) It was a couple other frameworks that I'd played with, all of which seemed to go shrug, not our concern when the question of managed state came up. I'll give Rocket a try and see if I have better luck.

[bjz_]

I was actually going to use `lazy_static!` for this! Good to see a nicer solution is now here. :)