Introducing reqwest

So far, we have only talked about writing servers and used curl to access those. Sometimes, programmatically accessing a server becomes a necessity. In this section, we will discuss the reqwest crate and look at how to use it; this borrows heavily from the requests library in Python. Thus, it is very easy to set up and use, starting first with the project setup:

$ cargo new --bin reqwest-example

The next step for our demo is to include our dependencies. Our Cargo config should look like this:

[package]
name = "reqwest-example"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Foo<[email protected]>"]

[dependencies]
reqwest = "0.8.1"
serde_json = "1.0.6"
serde = "1.0.21"
serde_derive = "1.0.21"

Here, we will use Serde to serialize and deserialize our data to JSON. Very conveniently, we will use the Rocket server we wrote in the last section. Our main file will look like this:

// ch6/reqwest-example/src/main.rs

extern crate serde_json;
#[macro_use]
extern crate serde_derive;
extern crate reqwest...