Markdown server (Rust)

In a quest to take better notes, and organize my life, I’ve begun using a Zettelkasten method. The most common tool for this is Obsidian, which is quite good, but doesn’t integrate well with my preferred workflow. Notably:

• using neovim to edit and create files
• storing everything on my local server over VPN

To get closer to that goal, I wrote a webserver to browse files, and render markdown. This also provided a good project to learn how to program in Rust.

There are two implementations:

• Simple markdown server (archived) – very simple, implemented with a synchronous runtime and threadpool
• Hyper markdown server – implemented with an async runtime (tokio), and the hyper library for http requests.

The server provides:

• a full directory listing and browser
• rendering of markdown files
• support for images and pdf files

Because it was a learning exercise, I chose to use lower-level libraries rather than frameworks like Axum or Actix. The downside of not using a higher-level framework is that I don’t get easy access to middleware like authorization or tracing. However, this is intended to run locally with only get requests, so that’s fine for my purposes.