We're building a new product at work, for which we've decided to use Rust and tower-web for the backend. There don't seem to be any Tower examples using state in request handlers, so this is a quick copypasta showing how to add Diesel so request handlers can do database operations.

First, establish a connection. I'm using an r2d2::Pool wrapping a Diesel Postgres connection:

use diesel::pg::PgConnection;
use diesel::r2d2::{ConnectionManager, Pool};
use std::env;
use std::error;

pub fn establish_connection() -> Result<Pool<ConnectionManager<PgConnection>>, Box<error::Error>> {
    let database_url = env::var("DATABASE_URL")?;
    let cm = ConnectionManager::new(database_url);
    let pool = Pool::new(cm)?;
    Ok(pool)
}

Next, implement the handler. The example below returns every item for the categories table. I'm assuming you've got your Diesel schemas and stuff set up here. If not, following the getting started guide.

use crate::models::Category;
use tower_web::impl_web;
use std::io;

#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct Categories {
    conn: Pool<ConnectionManager<PgConnection>>,
}

#[derive(Response)]
struct CategoriesResponse {
    categories: Vec<Category>,
}

impl_web! {
    impl Categories {
        pub fn new(conn: Pool<ConnectionManager<PgConnection>>) -> Self {
            Self { conn }
        }

        #[get("/api/categories")]
        #[content_type("json")]
        fn categories(&self) -> Result<CategoriesResponse, io::Error> {
            let cats = categories
                .load::<Category>(
                    &self
                        .conn
                        .get()
                        .map_err(|e| io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::Other, e))?,
                )
                .map_err(|e| io::Error::new(io::ErrorKind::Other, e))?;

            Ok(CategoriesResponse { categories: cats })
        }
    }
}

Most tower-web examples use a unit struct with no fields like struct Categories;. In this case, I'm adding a conn field to store a connection. I also add a new() method to create a new Categories handler without making conn public.

You can use this in your Tower setup code like this:

mod handlers;
mod models;

use diesel::pg::PgConnection;
use diesel::r2d2::{ConnectionManager, Pool};
use handlers::categories;
use std::error;
use tower_web::ServiceBuilder;

pub fn main() -> Result<(), Box<error::Error>> {
    let pool = establish_connection()?;

    let addr = "127.0.0.1:9000".parse().expect("Invalid address");

    println!("Listening on http://{}", addr);

    ServiceBuilder::new()
        .resource(categories::Categories::new(pool.clone()))
        .run(&addr)
        .unwrap();

    Ok(())
}

Note the categories handler line and its use of Categories::new().

Done!

This might be blatantly obvious to most Tower Web users, but this short tutorial is here in case it's not. I'm not sure how non-pooled connections will work, as the impl_web! macro hides a lot of the lifetimes and trait bounds, so YMMV.