Introduction to Web Servers and Actix Web

Motivation

Before we go building an auto GPT that builds web servers for us, we need to build one ourselves. There are two reasons why we are building a template: first, to understand what it is and what it does; second, to provide it to large language models as a template. If we have a template for a large language model to work from, it’s much more likely that we will get good results. Therefore, we want to give it something tried and tested that it can use as a reference if needed

What is a Web Server?

Well, you can imagine that when a person goes to a website, they are presented with a web page. The web page is handled by a server that the client talks to. The client is going to be a web browser used by the user. The server makes all of the CRUDCreate, read, update and, delete operations that the website asks the server to handle, and it does so in the background. The server then sends out a response to the client after it is done processing the client’s request, and changes are reflected on the website accordingly.

For our project, we’ll build a web server using Rust mainly because it’s good at managing memory and keeping memory usage to a minimum. Rust is also fast, and we’re in control of how it handles all errors and data.

The Actix Web framework

Actix is a Rust web framework that provides features like routing, middleware, request pre-processing, and response post-processing. With the added layer of Rust’s type safety and memory management, Actix has become one of the ideal web frameworks for hosting web servers.

Here are some of the packages we’ll use from the Actix Cargo package: