Rapinsel-Spleen - For the law was given by Make (P5)

Table of contents

Cargo watch

You already have noticed that every time you make a change you have recompile but there is a handy watcher we can install that will do that for us.

Let’s create a Makefile in the root of our project:

touch Makefile

And define a dev command

dev:
	cargo watch -q -c -w src/ -x run

Install cargo watch:

cargo install cargo-watch

And voila we can now start it up by running:

make dev

Postgres in Docker

Nowadays spinning up a database couldn’t be easier with Docker. I’ll assume you have docker installed on your system. If not please refer to these docs to install docker.

Install Docker on Fedora

Install Docker on Windows

We need two files: a .env file for our environment variables and a docker-compose.yml where we can define what system and database we want to have.

Create these files in the root of our project:

touch .env docker-compose.yml
mkdir -p data/pgdata # this will save the postgres data on your local disk

In .env we put the postgres connection string (you can rename the variables to anything you like)

# Postgres
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://rapinsel:secret@localhost:5432/rapinsel"

# Docker
DOCKER_IMAGE="postgres:16.3-alpine"
CONTAINER_NAME="postgres-rapinsel"
POSTGRES_DB="rapinsel"
POSTGRES_USER="rapinsel"
POSTGRES_PASSWORD="secret"

The docker-compose.yml I basically copied from the Docker website and looks like this:

version: "3.9"
services:
  db:
    image: ${DOCKER_IMAGE}
    container_name: ${CONTAINER_NAME}
    shm_size: 128mb
    restart: always
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready"]
      interval: 1s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 10
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=${POSTGRES_DB}
      - POSTGRES_USER=${POSTGRES_USER}
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    user: 1000:1000
    volumes:
      - ./data/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data

volumes:
  pgdata:

Now all we have to do is run this command to start our postgres docker:

docker-compose up -d

And if you want to stop the database issue this command:

docker-compose down

Finally you could update the Makefile like I have done to save some keystrokes and live longer.

# Docker
dup:
	docker-compose up -d
ddown:
	docker-compose down

Useful VSCode extensions

If you are using VSCode you could install these extensions: Database Client JDBC to have a nice gui to connect and interact with your postgres database and the Docker Extension but if you have your own tools that’s fine too, use whatever you like.

Play and poke around in your database and docker instance and if you mess up, no worries you can always delete the whole crap and start over.

In the next chapter we…