Tutorial 02: CLI Automation & Generators ⚡

Your goal: generate a small piece of the application, find the resulting files and understand what still needs your code. You need the CLI installed in Tutorial 01 (cargo rullst --version prints rullst 13.0.0-alpha.4).

Rullst provides opinionated code generators (make:*) for controllers, models, migrations, and resources. The current generators register generated Rust modules when possible; they do not add application routes. make:controller and make:model also refresh the generated project map (.llms.txt, .rullst/context-map.json) and diagram.md; hand-written versions of those files are kept. Review every generated file and mount the intended routes yourself.

Create the project

Create a Blank starter with SQLite and enter it:

cargo rullst new shop --default --blueprint blank --database sqlite \
  --skip-initial-migration
cd shop

--default skips the wizard’s questions. The project has Cargo.toml, Rullst.toml, .env, src/main.rs (the routes, in router()) and a first users migration. Run every command below from this directory; the following tutorials use the same project unless they say otherwise. To see the welcome page, run cargo rullst dev and open http://127.0.0.1:3000; the first build can take several minutes.

🛠️ Essential Scaffolding Commands

Run the three commands in order: each one adds different files.

1. Generate a Controller

cargo rullst make:controller ProductsController

Creates src/controllers/products_controller.rs with placeholder index, show, store, update, and delete handlers and registers the module (pub mod controllers; in src/main.rs). Mount its page by adding a line to the routes![...] list in router():

get("/products" => controllers::products_controller::index),

After cargo rullst dev rebuilds, http://127.0.0.1:3000/products shows the generated placeholder page.

2. Generate a Model & Migration

cargo rullst make:model Product --migration

Creates the model in src/models/product.rs and a timestamped Rust migration (src/migrations/m<timestamp>_create_products.rs) that src/migrations/mod.rs registers. The model starts with an id and a snapshot field, the migration with id and timestamps; Tutorial 03 adds the columns. cargo rullst dev applies pending migrations when it starts; cargo rullst db:migrate applies them without starting the server (Tutorial 05).

3. Generate a Full-Stack Resource Starting Point

cargo rullst make:resource Category

Scaffolds a model (src/models/category.rs), its migration, a controller (src/controllers/category_controller.rs) and HTML view placeholders (views/category/index.html and views/category/form.html) in one command. Use a name that has no model yet: for an existing model or table the command skips the create-table migration. The generated controller is not a complete authorized CRUD implementation.

🔍 Static CLI Code Inspection

Inspect recognizable source declarations without launching a server:

# Inspect recognizable routes! declarations
cargo rullst inspect routes

# Print ORM models and field types
cargo rullst inspect models

Add --json for a versioned machine-readable document (see the CLI reference).

💡 Key Takeaways

• Scaffolding generators maintain architectural consistency across team members.
• cargo rullst inspect performs bounded source-text inspection. Route output recognizes explicit single-line routes! entries (get, post, put and delete); model output lists public declarations from src/models. It is not complete macro expansion or a Rust semantic analysis.
• Generators never add routes: mount each handler in router() yourself.