Build saas fast. Repeat.

saasbase provides a range of functionality useful for building saas web applications, covering many things from user management and auth, to payments and invoice generation.

It is quite opinionated and channels decisions made based on core motivations: simplicity, extendability and development speed.

It focuses on the hypermedia-based approach with server-side generated html, champions embedded key-value databases for data storage and targets a deployment model of single all-in-one binary per application.

Data model

At the most basic level, saasbase library defines a concrete data model specifically targeting saas applications. Here one can find notions of Users, Products, Payments, subscription Plans and more.

The provided data model aims to fit most common use-cases for simple saas applications.

Common logic

saasbase provides an extensive set of operations for working with application state as defined with the data model.

This logic is referred to as common as it remains framework-agnostic. It can be found in the respective top-level modules.

Framework-specific logic

saasbase takes it upon itself to provide building blocks for use with selected web frameworks. This includes middleware, extractors and ready-made endpoints.

Framework-specific functionality is provided in respective feature-gated modules. Note that currently only the axum web framework is supported.

In terms of provisioned endpoints, you'll find that most of the functionality that doesn't need a custom html response is included. That's everything from /login form submit to common /api operations. Pages as well as html parts to be injected dynamically must be created by library user. See the examples directory for example usage.

Geting started

The fastest way to get started is to build and run the provided demo. Clone the repo, navigate to ./demo and simply run cargo run.

The demo should now be accessible at localhost:8000. If that port is unavailable on your machine simply modify the address field of the ./demo/saasbase.toml file.

For a more involved example application using saasbase see the ruda project.

Examples showing off particular aspects of the library are also provided.

While you already have the repository cloned you can try running the saasbase-cli tool. Navigate to ./cli and do cargo run. With saasbase-cli you'll be able to inspect and mutate application state, either on-line or off-line.

Pulling the library

Pull in saasbase dependency into your project, putting the following into your Cargo.toml [dependencies]:

saasbase = "0.1.0"

As saasbase tends to be opinionated and encourages employing certain solutions for the sake of efficiency, the default feature set is meant to be sensible for most use-cases.

That said, crate features can provide additional and/or alternative solutions in some cases (for example different database storages). Feel free to make use of them as needed.

saasbase = { version = "0.1.0", default-features = false, features = ["axum", "fjall"] }

Using the library

saasbase is organized into modules based on type of functionality they provide.

Common usage pattern involves defining a configuration (or loading it from file) and using it to generate a saasbase router to be merged with the main application router.

Assets and templates should be provided alongside Rust code. Assets can either be read from the filesystem at runtime or embedded into the application binary to enhance portability.

Deploying

Deployment of a saasbase-based application can be as easy as compiling down to a single binary and exposing the web server listener to the outside world. They only requirement on the system is a Rust installation and a network connection.