writing » programming » plaster-box

Plaster Box

Introducing PlasterBox! My clean, simple, and open source Pastebin. Go try it out at paste.connorcode.com. Source code can be found on GitHub.

Because sometimes when you are feeling down, you just need to write another pastebin.

Features

PlasterBox currently only has some off the planned features, so expect more stuff in the future.

For now, you can make new Bins with a Title and Body, and view the other bins in chronological order. You can get a raw view in plain text of any bin and use the API to make / view bins programmatically.

Stack

For this project I used Sass and Alipne.js for the front end and my webserver micro framework afire on the backend.

Frontend

In the front end I used the Sass CSS preprocessor and Alpine.js the lightweight JS framework. I also used the Bulma the CSS framework. This was simply because I had never used a CSS framework before :p. I liked using a CSS framework and I think for the next web app I make I will look into tailwindcss.

Backend

As always I used Rust for the backend with my web server framework afire. This app is mostly server side rendered, only using JavaScript for submitting the form, resizing the text box and the Raw / Copy buttons.

Each bin or paste is defined with the following struct. Each bin has a UUID, the stored text, a name, and the time of creation (Unix epoch time).

#[derive(Debug, Serialize, Deserialize)]
pub struct Bin {
    uuid: [u8; 16],
    data: String,
    name: String,
    time: u64,
}

For storing the data I’m just using bincode to serialize / deserialize the bins into / from bytes. I probably should use a database, but I don’t really like any of the options available.

API

The PlasterBox API allows you to create and view Bins.

All of the following examples are in Rust and make use of ureq. To add it to your cargo project add the following to the dependency section of your Cargo.toml.

[dependencies]
ureq = "2.4.0"

Create a New Bin

The frontend web app uses this same API to create bins. It’s used by sending a POST to /new with the text defined in the request body and the title in the Name header.

Here is an example program to create a new bin.

const URI: &str = "http://paste.connorcode.com";

fn main() -> Result<(), ureq::Error> {
    let body: String = ureq::post(&format!("{URI}/new"))
        .set("Name", "Title")
        .send_string("Body!")?
        .into_string()?;

    println!("{URI}/b/{body}");
    Ok(())
}

View a Bin

This is super simple and can be done by sending a GET request to /raw/{UUID}. Like before here is an example program.

const URI: &str = "http://paste.connorcode.com";
const UUID: &str = "971d0341-fca1-4cc7-a463-a962314b7b56";

fn main() -> Result<(), ureq::Error> {
    let body: String = ureq::get(&format!("{URI}/raw/{UUID}"))
        .call()?
        .into_string()?;

    println!("{}", body);
    Ok(())
}