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Tower Async

Tower Async is a library of modular and reusable components for building robust networking clients and servers. It is a fork of https://github.com/tower-rs/tower and makes use of async traits to simplify things and make it more easier to integrate async functions into middleware.

NOTE that the crates in this repository are meant as an open source collaborative playground to experiment ideas in regards to the async future of tower. It is not actively developed beyond its intiatial implementation by Plabayo.

It remains however open to all to contribute to it, discuss using/about it, and so on.

The future of tower is tower itself, and the Rust language teams have exciting plans for it, as can be for exmaple read at https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/12/21/async-fn-rpit-in-traits.html. We learned a lot from forking tower and working on this experimental fork, but it became very clear that (1) this approach might not be the approach and (2) the Rust language (even nightly) was clearly not yet ready for this kind of code.

For now the ideas of tower-async continue to live in rama where it was further changed and adapted to meet the needs to rama. rama keeps also in sync with tower-rs/* codebases, such as tower and tower-http, porting over improvements from these repos manually as they get contributed to the tower-rs org.

You can find rama at: https://github.com/plabayo/rama/.

Website of rama is: https://ramaproxy.org/.

Overview

Tower Async aims to make it as easy as possible to build robust networking clients and servers. It is protocol agnostic, but is designed around a request / response pattern. If your protocol is entirely stream based, Tower Async may not be a good fit.

It is a fork of https://github.com/tower-rs/tower and makes use of async traits (RFC-3185: Static async fn in traits) to simplify things and make it more easier to integrate async functions into middleware.

The authors of this repository are not affiliated with the official Tokio and Tower codebases, other than that we as Plabayo do sponsor the Tokio project via Github Sponsors.

Tower async was featured as crate of the week in "This week in Rust #505": https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2023/07/26/this-week-in-rust-505/#crate-of-the-week.

If you want to see a prime example of how much simpler using tower_async is versus tower, you can see an example here:

A delay service using tower: https://github.com/plabayo/tower-async/blob/4ae0c4747fac6cc69b27c87a7ea5cacdd8bab3fb/tower-async-bridge/src/into_async/async_layer.rs#L91-L169.

That same service can be written in tower_async as follows:

#[derive(Debug)]
struct DelayService<S> {
    inner: S,
    delay: std::time::Duration,
}

impl<S> DelayService<S> {
    fn new(inner: S, delay: std::time::Duration) -> Self {
        Self { inner, delay }
    }
}

impl<S, Request> tower_async_service::Service<Request> for DelayService<S>
where
    S: tower_async_service::Service<Request>,
{
    type Response = S::Response;
    type Error = S::Error;

    async fn call(&self, request: Request) -> Result<Self::Response, Self::Error> {
        tokio::time::sleep(self.delay).await;
        self.inner.call(request)
    }
}

If you compare that with the linked tower version you can probably agree that things are a lot simpler if you do not have to hand write future state machines yourself, which is the reason why we have the async sugar in the first place.

Of course I do acknowledge that if you make use of amazing utilities provided by crates such as https://docs.rs/futures-util-preview/latest/futures_util/future/index.html That you an write pretty much the same code without having to handwrite the future yourself.

This is however not always possible, and it does mean that you need to (1) know about this and (2) pull it as a dependency and all that it brings with it. While in reallity you really just want to be able write your middleware in an async manner.

We fully acknowledge that tower had to use the approach it used as for many years this was simply the only sensible thing to do, unless you want to force your users to make use of the https://docs.rs/async-trait/latest/async_trait/, a choice not everyone is willing to make, and sometimes they might not even have the luxary to do so.

Come join us at discord on the #tower-async public channel at Discord or tag @glendc at Tokio's Tower discord instead.

Where suitable we'll keep in sync (manually) with Tower and if the opportunity arises we'll contribute back "upstream" as well. Given however how big the diversange we aren't sure how likely that is.

This set of libraries is best suited in an ecosystem of its own, that is to say, making use only of tower_async libraries and dependents on it. At the very least it is desired that tower_async is the puppeteer with where needed making use of tower (classic) (middleware) layers.

For an example on how to operate purely within a tower_async environment you can explore the old Rama codebase @ a11c228a667126316bfb13c3a58159bdd83cb6b4, a proxy framework, written purely with a tower_async mindset, and the main motivator to start this fork. The latest rama codebase however makes use of tower once again, as the time was not yet ready for using [tower-async] in this capacity.

You can however also bridge tower and tower_async in any other way. Please consult the "Bridging to Tokio's official Tower Ecosystem" chapter for more information on how to do that.

Difference with Tokio's official Tower Ecosystem?

• Make use of Async Traits (RFC-3185: Static async fn in traits) instead of requiring the user to manually implement Futures;
  • Which in fact forces users to Box Services that rely on futures which cannot be named, e.g. those returned by async functions that the user might have to face by using common utility functions from the wider Tokio ecosystem;
• Drop the notion of poll_ready (See the FAQ)
• Use &self for Service::call instead of &mut self:
  • this to simplify its usage;
  • makes it clear that the user is responsible for proper state sharing;
  • makes it more compatible with the ecosystem (e.g. hyper (v1) also takes services by &self);

Bridging to Tokio's official Tower Ecosystem

You can make use of the tower-async-bridge crate as found in this repo in the ./tower-async-bridge directory, and published at crates.io under the same name.

At a high level it allows you to:

• Turn a tower::Service into a tower_async::Service (requires the into_async feature);
• Turn a tower_async::Service into a tower::Service;
• Use a tower_async::Layer within a tower environment (e.g. tower::ServiceBuilder);
• Use a tower::Layer within a tower_async environment (e.g. tower_async::ServiceBuilder) (requires the into_async feature);

Please check the crate's unit tests and examples to see specifically how to use the crate in order to achieve this.

Furthermore we also urge you to only use this kind of approach for transition purposes and not as a permanent way of life. Best in our opinion is to use one or the other and not to combine the two. But if you do absolutely must use one combined with the other, tower-async-bridge should allow you to do exactly that.

You can find an Axum service example of this and why this might be useful at ./tower-async-http/examples/axum-key-value-store.

The above example shows how you can use Tower-Async* in any location where you would otherwise use Tower. As such it is also possible to use these crates on projects that use Tonic, Hyper, Warp, among others.

Supported Rust Versions

Tower Async requires nightly Rust for the time being and has no backwards compatibility promises for the time being.

Once async traits are stabilized we'll start supporting stable rust once again, and we can start working towards backwards compatibility.

Read https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/05/03/stabilizing-async-fn-in-trait.html for more information on this roadmap by the Rust Language Core Team.

Getting Started

If you're brand new to Tower and want to start with the basics we recommend you check out some of the original Tower guides.

We work exactly the same as Tower, expect in an async manner and slightly easier to use as such. But the core ideas are obviously the same, so it should never the less help you to get started.

Browse the examples at tower-async-http/examples to see some examples on how to use tower_async and its sibling crates. While these are focussed on http examples, note that:

• tower_async can work for any request-response flow (akin to tower);
• you can also use tower_async with http web services without making use of the tower-async-http crate, it only is there to provide extra middleware for http-specific purposes, but this is all optional.

The documentation also contains some smaller examples and of course the codebase can be read as well, together with its unit tests.

Are you still new to Rust, or feel you have much to learn on your Rust learning journey? You might find it useful to use https://rust-lang.guide/ as your learning guide, which might also help you get you on your way to understand the more complicated parts of this monorepo codebase.

Sponsorship

Regular and onetime sponsors alike help us to pay the development and service costs done in function of all Plabayo's Free and Open Source work.

We're also a monthly sponsor of Tokio ourselves, to give back to all the great work done and continued effort being put in by them.

You can find more about Plabayo Sponsorship at https://github.com/sponsors/plabayo.

One time sponsorships (the so called "buy me a coffee", but then via GitHub Sponsors payments), are welcome as much as regular sponsors. Not everybody have the financial means to sponsor, so feel free to contribute in any other way that you can think of.

FAQ

Where is the poll_ready method from Tower's Service?

This has been removed for the purpose of simplification and because the authors of this fork consider it a problem out of scope:

• most Tower services / layers do not ever need the poll_ready method, and simply call the inner service for that;
• for some backpressure purposes you do want to know the request to know how to handle it, so poll_ready wouldn't work for these;

poll_ready was also used for load balancing services but this is considered out of scope:

• load balancing incoming network streams is in our humble opinion more something to be handled by your network infrastructure surrounding your service (using a... load balancer);
• and again... if you do want to load balance within a service it might be because you actually require context from the request to know what to do, in which case poll_ready wouldn't work for you;

Where you do still want to apply some kind of rate limiting, back pressure or load balancing within a Tower (Async) Service you are to do it within the call function instead.

This fork is however still in its early days, so feel free to start a discussion if you feel different about this topic. The authors of this library are always open for feedback but retain the reservation to deny any request they wish.

Where is my favourite Tower Utility?

As all the tower code has to be manually ported, there might be some features missing. The tower ecosystem also continues to thrive and live happy, so there might still be new features added there as well. Feel free to chat with us or open a ticket on GitHub in case you wish to add/port such feature(s).

Note that some features are not supported on purpose:

1. all the 'ready' related functionality was removed on purpose as we believe it to be out of scope

• as such also all utilities that rely on this or build on top of this aren't supported

See the previous FAQ point to get our point of view related to load balancing and the like.

Help! My Async Trait's Future is not Send

Due to a bug in Rust, most likely its trait resolver, you can currently run into this not very meanigful error.

Cfr: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/114142

By using the `turbo fish' syntax you can resolve it. See that issue for more details on this solution.

See https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=nightly&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=df177519275726a7df18045cf90a59a9 for an interactive example, with this being the important part:

// this fails to compile
// higher_order_async_fn(EchoService, "Hello, World!").await;

// ...this does work:
higher_order_async_fn::<EchoService, _>(EchoService, "Hello, World!").await;

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Big thanks and credits go towards the original Tower authors which licensed their code under the same License type.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Tower Async by you, shall be licensed as MIT, without any additional terms or conditions.

We do not have a roadmap for Tower Async. But here are some ideas on what you can contribute:

• bug reports;
• spelling checks;
• port over missing features from "classic" tower ecosystem;
• make ported async tower code more idiomatic;
• add a feature of your own desire;
• fix an open issue.