Chat

A fully async, framework-free web chat built from scratch in Rust, including manual HTTP parsing, WebSocket implementation, cookies, and SQLx-powered persistence.

Features

• User registration with Argon2 password hashing
• Login/logout endpoints
• Session-based authentication using cookies
• Database integration via SQLx
• WebSocket chat support
• Session verification via the /me endpoint
• Clean service-layer architecture
• Pure async architecture
• Manual parsing and handling of HTTP requests
• SHA-1-hashed session cookies
• Frontend session restoration
• Session cleanup on server shutdown
• Manually implemented simple file server
• Pre-built Docker container
• Can be run both inside and outside Docker

Tech Stack

Backend

• Rust
• Custom-built web framework (routing, sessions, WebSockets)
• Tokio (async runtime)
• Tokio-Tungstenite (WebSocket implementation)
• SQLx (database layer)
• MySQL (persistent storage)
• Session cookies (authentication)

Frontend

• HTML / CSS / JavaScript
• Fetch API
• WebSockets (real-time messaging)

Security

• Argon2 (password hashing)

Serialization

• Serde (JSON handling)

Deployment

• Docker

Structure

SRC
│   db.rs
│   fileserver.rs
│   http_utils.rs
│   lib.rs
│   session_utils.rs
│
├───bin
│       main.rs
│
└───routes
    │   history.rs
    │   mod.rs
    │   routes.rs
    │   route_models.rs
    │
    ├───auth
    │       endpoints.rs
    │       form.rs
    │       mod.rs
    │
    └───chat
            mod.rs
            models.rs
            websocket.rs

Configuration

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/LeakyDutchmann/chat.git

Then build and start the application:

docker compose up --build

You're ready to go.

To start the application again later:

docker compose up

or launch it from Docker Desktop.

If you don't have Docker installed, follow the official guide:

https://www.docker.com/get-started/

If you decide to start server outside of a Docker, make sure
to properly install and initialize MySql database and pass it's url instead of

let db_url = "mysql://chat:chatpass@mysql:3306/chat_db";

in main function. You can look up database migrations here

Dependencies

anyhow = "1.0.104"
argon2 = "0.5.3"
base64 = "0.22.1"
colored = "3.1.1"
cookie = "0.18"
futures-util = "0.3.32"
hex = "0.4.3"
rand = "0.8"
rand_core = { version = "0.6", features = ["std"] }
serde = { version = "1.0.228", features = ["derive"] }
serde_json = "1.0.150"
sha1 = "0.11.0"
sqlx = { version = "0.9", features = ["mysql", "runtime-tokio", "macros", "chrono", "mysql-rsa"] }
tokio = { version = "1.53", features = ["full"]}
tokio-tungstenite = "0.30.0"
urlencoding = "2.1.3"

Endpoints

GET /register

Creates a new user and stores it in the database. Also sets a session cookie in the browser.

Responds with 400 BAD REQUEST if the user already exists.

GET /login

Looks up the user in the database, verifies the password, and sets a session cookie.

If the user does not exist or the password is incorrect, the server responds with 400 BAD REQUEST along with a JSON message describing the error.

GET /me

Checks the cookie header and looks for a matching session in the database.

If found, returns the authenticated user's username.

Responds with 404 NOT FOUND if no valid session is found.

GET /logout

Clears the session cookie and logs the user out.

GET /history

Retrieves all chat messages from the database and returns them as a JSON array.

GET /ws

Upgrades the connection to a WebSocket if the user is authenticated.

Responds with 400 BAD REQUEST if the request does not contain a cookie header.

Responds with 401 UNAUTHORIZED if the cookie is invalid.

File server

These endpoints serve static files:

• GET / → index.html
• GET /style.css → style.css
• GET /reset.css → reset.css
• GET /script.js → script.js
• GET /favicon.ico → the site's icon

A word about this project

This project is a remake of my previous project:

https://github.com/LeakyDutchmann/Chat-app

This time, I decided to implement everything without using a web framework such as Rocket or Axum.

That meant manually parsing HTTP requests, implementing routing, handling sessions, and building a fully asynchronous backend server from scratch.

That's exactly what this project does.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2026 LeakyDutchmann

See the LICENSE file for full details.