This tutorial demonstrates how build and deploy Rust applications efficiently using Docker caching mechanisms and cargo-chef.

To continue, you must have Docker and docker-compose installed, besides the Rust toolchain.

As a bonus, this tutorial show how to use pre-built binaries as opposed to building it on a CD/CI server, for low cost purposes due to the expensive and time-consuming process of Rust builds.

Note: A couple changes are required to adapt this strategy into your own projects:

• The path C:/dev/git/rust-pipeline should be replaced in docker-compose.yml.
• The name rust-pipeline must be changed in the commands and Dockerfiles in ./docker/ to reflect your application name.

Note: To deploy and run the application on the server using the benefits of cargo-chef caching, all needed is to execute docker-compose up.

docker-compose up

Besides starting the application, this will compile the binary required by the next steps. Alternatively, this could be done without docker-compose and without running it locally:

docker build -t rust-pipeline -f docker/Dockerfile .
mkdir bin
docker run -it --rm -v C:/dev/git/rust-pipeline:/tmp/ rust-pipeline-pre cp /app/rust-pipeline /tmp/bin/

mkdir bin
docker-compose run app cp /app/rust-pipeline /tmp/bin/

Note: At this stage, the binary ./bin/rust-pipeline should be committed to your repository, then checked out on the target machine.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.precompiled.yml up