How to Build a REST API using Actix Rust to Execute System Commands — A Step-by-Step Guide

This daemon can be used in the application server or in the database server to execute system commands using rest API calls.

actix.rs

Hello, I’m Asel. Today, I am going to show you how to create a rest API for executing system commands in your server. This method is used by well-known companies. Imagine you have moved your database to another server other than your backend server and you want to take control of your database server from your backend API. For that, we have to create a daemon in the database server.

*note — I’m writing this as a POC. If you are going production you should consider security issues seriously( using https etc).

Step 1 — Picking up dependencies

Let’s start by adding a couple of dependencies to our project.

I’ll give a short intro about these dependencies first and also once we use them. Actix is the framework that we gonna use for our rest API. serde is used for serialization and deserialization purposes. simple_logger and log are used for logging and the last one pam is used for user authentication purposes.

Step 2 — Up and run a simple server

As the documentation says I’ll follow these lines of codes.

Architecture overview

If everything fine you’ll see the same log as mine.

terminal logs

This is a very very simple implementation, but I think it’s enough for a foundation on using actix.

├── Cargo.lock
├── Cargo.toml
├── LICENSE
├── README.md…