Starter Rust crate for creating applications

Starter provides our opinionated ways for creating Rust command line applications.

Try it

Install:

cargo install starter

Run:

starter --test --verbose

Get the source code:

git clone https://github.com/sixarm/starter-rust-crate.git

Goals

Goals include:

• Demonstrate how to combine crates for command line argument parsing, configuration, logging, errors, etc.

• Describe project conventions that help an application team with growth as well as long-term maintenance.

• Provide a starting point for our new projects.

Anti-goals

Anti-goals include:

• Code everything from scratch. Instead, we want to use existing crates that are well-maintained and have a large community.

• Code freeze. Instead, this crate is a work in progress, and will evolve as we learn.

• Compatibility with no_std, or old Rust versions, or less-supported platforms. Instead, we want to use std, and recent Rust versions, and fully-supported platforms.

Features

Features include:

• Run a command line argument parser, by using the crate clap.

• Load a configuration file, by using the crate confy.

• Create custom errors, by using the crate thiserror.

• Log messages such as trace and debug, by using the crate thiserror.

• Log messages to configuration places, by using the crate env_logger.

• Use assert macros for testing and production, by using the crate assertables

Project structure

The project structure aims for clean separation of concerns of generic application capabilities.

• src - Source code.
  • app - Application generic code.
    • args - Arguments structure; this may be set via clap.
    • clap - Command line argument parser i.e. clap.
    • config - Configuration structure; this may be set via confy.
    • confy - Configuration loader from a TOML file.
    • mod - Module file that includes all the modules.
    • paths - Path helpers, such as for directories and files.
    • run - Run function that handles everything; called by main or lib.
• cspell.json - CSpell is a spell checker for code.

Cargo.toml

Dependencies:

• assertables - Assert macros for testing and runtime in production.
• confy - Configuration management.
• clap - Command Line Argument Parser.
• env_logger - A logger that can be configured via environment variables.
• indoc - Indented document literals.
• map The map macro for creating map collections.
• log - Lightweight logging facade.
• serde - Serialize/deserialize framework. Used by confy.
• thiserror - Error derive macro for the standard library std::error::Error trait.