Development Environment as Code

The Visual Studio Code Remote - Containers extension lets you use a Docker container as a full-featured development environment. This fixes the following problems

  • Enables developers other than yourself to get quickly up to speed
  • Stops issues such as "It works on my machine"
  • Allows you to check your development environment into git.

Installation

Install the devcontainer extension in VSCode and then setup a Rust environment.

Creating a vault

Install Rust on Nails

We have pre-configured a development environment with all the tools needed to create a full stack rust application.

To get started create a folder for your project. Change directory into that folder then run.

mkdir project-name
cd project-name

MacOS and Linux

curl -L https://github.com/purton-tech/rust-on-nails/archive/main.tar.gz | \
  tar xvz --strip=2 rust-on-nails-main/nails-devcontainer/ \
  && rm devcontainer-template.json

Windows

curl -L https://github.com/purton-tech/rust-on-nails/archive/main.tar.gz | \
  tar xvz --strip=2 rust-on-nails-main/nails-devcontainer/ \
  && del devcontainer-template.json

VS Code

Load the folder into visual studio code. On the bottom left corner of VS Code you should see a green icon. Click on this and select open in container.

After the container is downloaded you will have a preconfigured development environment with the following folder structure.

How you folder structure will look.

.
└── .devcontainer/
    ├── .bash_aliases
    ├── .githooks/
    │   └── precommit
    ├── devcontainer.json
    ├── docker-compose.yml
    └── Dockerfile
└── .gitignore
└── README.md

Setting up Git

Open up a terminal in VSCode (CTRL + `) and execute

$ git init --initial-branch=main
Initialized empty Git repository in /workspace/.git/

Add a Workspace

We are going to create a workspace for our web application. Create a new Cargo.toml file in the root folder and add the following.

[workspace]
resolver = "2"

members = [
    "crates/*",
]

Open up the terminal in VSCode again and run the following

cargo new --vcs=none crates/web-server
# Created binary (application) `crates/web-server` package

You should now have a folder structure like the following.

├── .devcontainer/
│   └── ...
└── crates/
│         web-server/
│         │  └── main.rs
│         └── Cargo.toml
└── Cargo.toml

Testing

Test out your development environment with

cargo run
#   Compiling app v0.1.0 (/workspace/app)
#    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1.16s
#     Running `target/debug/app`
# Hello, world!

Commit your code

From the /workspace folder

git add .
git commit -m"Initial Commit"