☀️ Context<State>

To recap, a Service::serve method has the following signature:

fn serve(
    &self,
    ctx: Context<State>,
    req: Request,
) -> impl Future<Output = Result<Self::Response, Self::Error>> + Send + '_;

• &self allows services to access shared Send + Sync + 'static state internal and specific to that Service;
• Request is the input used to produce a Result.

Context<State> is what this chapter is about, and its documemtation can be consumed at https://ramaproxy.org/docs/rama/context/struct.Context.html.

Context<State> is used to:

• access shared typesafe State defined by the code location instantiating the Service on its own or part of a stack.
• access Extensions that can be used to dynamically get and set extra (optional) data, to be passed for usage by inner service(s).
• spawn tasks for the given (async) executor, doing so gracefully if configured to do so.
• abrubt tasks early in a graceful manner in case of a shutdown using the gracuful ShutdownGuard if defined.

This is a clear distinction from a Tower service which only takes a Request. If that Request is an http Request it does allow one to add extra optional data using the Extensions type/data also available in an http Request. Hower it provides no means of typesafe State, executors, spawning etc. On top of that it would make it more awkward to also freely pass all this data between services, especially those operating across different layers of the network.

State

rama supports two kinds of states:

1. type-safe state: this is the S generic parameter in Context and is to be used as much as possible, given its existence and type properties can be validated at compile time
2. dynamic state: these can be injected as Extensionss using methods such as Context::insert

As a rule of thumb one should use the type-safe state (1) in case:

• the state is always expected to exist at the point the middleware/service is called
• the state is specific to the app or middleware
• and the state can be constructed in a default/empty state

The latter is important given the state is often created (or at least reserved) prior to it is actually being populated by the relevant middleware. This is not the case for app-specific state such as Database pools which are created since the start and shared among many different tasks.

The rule could be be simplified to "if you need to .unwrap() you probably want type-safe state instead". It's however just a guideline and not a hard rule. As maintainers of rama we'll do our best to respect it though, and we recommend you to do the same.

Any state that is optional, and especially optional state injected by middleware, can be inserted using extensions. It is however important to try as much as possible to then also consume this state in an approach that deals gracefully with its absence. Good examples of this are header-related inputs. Headers might be set or not, and so absence of Extensionss that might be created as a result of these might reasonably not exist. It might of course still mean the app returns an error response when it is absent, but it should not unwrap/panic.

State Wraps

📖 rustdoc link

rama was built from the ground up to operate on and between different layers of the network stack. This has also an impact on state. Because sure, typed state is nice, but state leakage is not. What do I mean with that?

When creating a TcpListener with state you are essentially creating and injecting state, which will remain as "read-only" for the enire life cycle of that TcpListener and to be made available for every incoming tcp connection, as well as the application requests (Http requests). This is great for stuff that is okay to share, but it is not desired for state that you wish to have a narrower scope. Examples are state that are tied to a single tcp connection and thus you do not wish to keep a global cache for this, as it would either be shared or get overly complicated to ensure you keep things separate and clean.

The solution is to wrap your state.

See for reference: /examples/http_conn_state.rs

The above example shows how can use the #as_ref(wrap) property within an #[derive(AsRef)] derived "state" struct, to wrap in a type-safe manner the "app-global" state within the "conn-specific" (tcp) state. This allows you to have state freshly created for each connection while still having ease of access to the global state.

Note though that you do not need the AsRef macro or even trait implementation to get this kind of access in your own app-specific leaf services. It is however useful — and at times even a requirement — in case you want your middleware stack to also include generic middleware that expect AsRef<T> trait bounds for type-safe access to state from within a middleware. E.g. in case your middleware expects a data source for some specific data type, it is of no use to have that middleware compile without knowing for sure that data source is made available to that middleware.