tekjar / rust-by-example

Learn Rust with examples (Live code editor included)

Rust by Example

What's this?

This is the source code of the Rust by Example website!

How to contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

How to generate the static site

Debian (Ubuntu) prerequisites

Install Rust and run:

sudo apt-get install nodejs npm subversion
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Non-Debian prerequisites

Install Rust nightly, node, npm, and subversion.

Build instructions

Run:

make all
make book
make test

View the results with make serve.

Details

We use these tools to generate the static site:

• Rust \o/
• GitBook

gitbook will generate the site from Markdown files (see details about how it works here).

Before running gitbook, we do a preprocessing step using src/main.rs.

This preprocessing has two steps:

Generating the SUMMARY.md

SUMMARY.md is generated from the examples/structure.json file. This JSON file contains a tree-like structure of "examples".

Each example has:

• an id, e.g. hello
• a title, e.g. Hello World
• optionally, children, which is a vector of sub-examples, e.g. null
• a directory under examples, e.g. examples/hello
• an entry in examples/structure.json, e.g. { "id": "hello", "title": "Hello World", "children": null }
• some source file(s), e.g. examples/hello/hello.rs
• an input markdown file, e.g. examples/hello/input.md

When dealing with a child example, the path will have to include the id of its ancestors; e.g. examples/variable/mut/input.md, implies that a mut example lives under the variable example.

Processing input.md

Instead of including the Rust code directly in input.md, the code lives in separate source files; the preprocessing step will insert the source code into the Markdown file.

For example, to insert the source code of the hello.rs file, the following syntax is used in the Markdown file:

• {hello.play} expands the source code embedded in a live code editor
• {hello.rs} expands to static/plain source code.
• {hello.out} expands to the output of executing the source code.

The Makefile provides the following recipes:

• make: builds update.rs and does the preprocessing step
• make book: runs gitbook to generate the book
• make serve: runs gitbook --serve to generate the book and publishes it under localhost:4000
• make test: will check all the rust source files for compilation errors

License

Rust by Example is dual-licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and the MIT license.

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for more details.