defuse-rust

A Rust rewrite of defuse.ca, ported from the old PHP code.

Copyright 2026, Taylor Hornby. All rights reserved.

Code is licensed under AGPL. Content is licensed under CC-BY-SA.

Dependencies

• Rust (stable)
• vim (for syntax highlighting)
• ruby (for big number calculator)
• gcc (for online assembler)
• objdump (for online assembler)

sudo apt-get install vim ruby gcc binutils

Development Environment Setup

Clone defuse-rust and defuse-tester:

git clone git@github.com:defuse/defuse-rust
git clone git@github.com:defuse/defuse-tester

Running the Dev Server

For this part, cd into defuse-rust:

cd defuse-rust

# 1. Start the database (first run creates all databases and tables)
cd dev
docker compose up -d
cd ..

# 2. Copy the dev environment file to the project root
cp dev/dotenv-example .env

# 3. Source the .env file to set necessary environment variables
# We need to export the environment variables so that they are available
# to child proceses (like when running the tests)
set -a && source .env && set +a

# 4. Run the unit tests (there may be expected failures with --include-ignored)
cargo test --no-fail-fast -- --include-ignored

# 5. Run the server
cargo run --release

By default, dev/dotenv-example will use the dev/test-storage directory as the storage directory. This directory contains minimal files in order to make the defuse-tester integration tests pass.

The dev database container uses dev/init.sql to automatically create all databases, tables, and users on first startup. To reset the database to a clean state:

cd dev
docker compose down -v   # -v removes the data volume
docker compose up -d     # re-creates everything from init.sql

Running the Integration Tests

While the server and database are running, in another terminal, cd into defuse-tester:

cd ../defuse-tester

Then, to run all of the integration tests, simply run:

DEFUSE_URL=http://localhost:3000/ cargo test --no-fail-fast  -- --include-ignored

Note: If you want to run the integration tests against the production server, you need to put the CAPTCHA bypass key at secrets/captcha-bypass-key.txt.

You can also take snapshots to compare against the PHP version:

cargo run --bin snapshot http://localhost:3000/ --normalize-vim-tags new-dev-snapshot-dir
cargo run --bin snapshot https://defuse.ca/ --normalize-vim-tags new-prod-snapshot-dir

And the benchmarks/stress tests:

cargo run --bin stress http://localhost:3000/

Measuring Code Coverage

Requires cargo-llvm-cov:

cargo install cargo-llvm-cov

From the defuse-rust directory, with the database already running:

Terminal 1 — build and run the instrumented server:

cargo llvm-cov clean
cargo llvm-cov run --release

Terminal 2 — run the integration tests:

cd ../defuse-tester
DEFUSE_URL=http://localhost:3000/ cargo test --no-fail-fast -- --include-ignored

After the tests finish, Ctrl+C the server in Terminal 1, then generate the report:

cargo llvm-cov report --release --html
# Report is at target/llvm-cov-target/html/index.html

AI Use Policy

AI tools were used to assist with building this website. All code has been fully reviewed, and rewritten for clarity when necessary, by myself (a human). If you would like to submit a PR, using AI is fine, but you must stand by the correctness of your submission as strongly as you would if you had written the code yourself.