Serving the frontend

Wouldn't it be interesting to serve the frontend from our server? Let's work on that in this chapter.

For this it is best to have an assets directory that will hold all of our static assets. In the server directory create an assets directory and move the index.html to it.

assets/
└── index.html

Serving static files

Gotham allows us to define a router. A router allows you to control which handlers get to handle certain requests. In order to use it we need some imports.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
use gotham::router::builder::{build_simple_router, DefineSingleRoute, DrawRoutes};
#}

We don't need the HELLO_WORLD, or say_hello, so we can get rid of it. Instead we will define the router to serve our index.html. We use the build_simple_router factory for that.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
let router = build_simple_router(|route|{
    route.get("/").to_file("assets/index.html");
});
#}

The build_simple_router accepts a closure that enables us to configure the routes. We want to respond with index.html when we make a get request.

Server with routes

We now need to start the server with our router.

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
gotham::start(addr, router);
#}

Verification

Restart the server by shutting it down and running cargo run again. This will recompile the server and start waiting for requests. Open your browser and open the application. It should serve the frontend application.