Tonic gRPC and Axum HTTP/1.1+2 co-hosting in Rust

An attempt at hosting HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and gRPC on the same port(s).

Multiple Hyper servers are spawned on different endpoints to showcase the use of binding to different IP addresses and ports while reusing the same server components. A Hyper service is used to switch the incoming traffic based on the content-type header and if application/grpc is detected, traffic is forwarded to the Tonic server; all other cases forward to Axum. This allows for transparent use of HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 (prior knowledge), as well as ALPN on the TLS-enabled ports. On Unixoids, Unix Domain Sockets are supported as well.

This project uses:

• Hyper as the server for HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 support.
  • tls-listener with tokio-rustls is used to provide TLS with h2 and http/1.1 ALPN support.
• Axum as the HTTP server.
• Tonic as the gRPC server.

Curl

non-TLS

curl -v http://127.0.0.1:36849/
curl -v http://127.1.0.1:36849/
curl --http2-prior-knowledge --insecure -vv http://127.0.0.1:36849/

Unix Domain Sockets

curl -v --unix-socket /tmp/cohosting.sock http://localhost:36849/

TLS with ALPN

curl --insecure -v https://127.0.0.1:36850/
curl --http1.1 --insecure -vv https://127.0.0.1:36850/
curl --http2 --insecure -vv https://127.0.0.1:36850/

nghttp (HTTP/2)

nghttp -v http://127.0.0.1:36849
nghttp -y -v https://127.0.0.1:36850

gRPC testing

Use gRPC reflection to introspect the service:

grpcurl --plaintext --use-reflection 127.0.0.1:36849 list
grpcurl --insecure --use-reflection 127.0.0.1:36850 list

Send a test request:

grpcurl --plaintext --use-reflection -d '{ "message": "World" }' 127.0.0.1:36849 example.YourService/YourMethod
grpcurl --insecure --use-reflection -d '{ "message": "World" }' 127.0.0.1:36850 example.YourService/YourMethod

Unix Domain Sockets

For UDS to work with gRPC, the :authority header needs to be sent. In grpcurl, the --authority=xyz flag is used for that:

grpcurl --unix --plaintext --use-reflection --authority localhost -d '{ "message": "World" }' /tmp/cohosting.sock example.YourService/YourMethod

Recommended reads

The Combining Axum, Hyper, Tonic, and Tower for hybrid web/gRPC apps series:

• Part 1: Overview of Tower
• Part 2: Understanding Hyper, and first experiences with Axum
• Part 3: Demonstration of Tonic for a gRPC client/server
• Part 4: How to combine Axum and Tonic services into a single service