Rust

Minimal Site Monitor in Rust

Web Tools

Create a small asynchronous application in just a few steps that monitors a website.

⏱️ 1h 0min
📦 6 modules

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What You'll Build

We'll build a practical site-monitoring CLI tool step by step. Starting from an empty Cargo project, we add an HTTP client, migrate to async with Tokio, introduce a polling loop with latency tracking, add resilient error handling, and finish with user-configurable command-line arguments via clap.

Along the way we cover core Rust concepts — crates, async/await, the Result type, pattern matching, and derive macros — in the context of a tool you can actually use.

Learning Objectives

  • Make HTTP requests with reqwest

  • Understand blocking vs async I/O in Rust

  • Use the Tokio runtime for async execution

  • Implement a periodic polling loop with timing

  • Handle errors gracefully with Result and match

  • Parse command-line arguments with clap derive

Prerequisites

  • Basic Rust syntax (functions, variables, types)

  • Familiarity with Cargo and crate dependencies

Assembly Steps

1

Project Scaffold

2

Blocking HTTP Client

3

Async Runtime With Tokio

4

Periodic Polling Loop

5

Graceful Error Handling

6

Command-Line Interface

Technologies

Rust HTTP Client Async Tokio reqwest Error Handling CLI clap Site Monitor