Can I use Reqwest to interact with RESTful APIs?

Yes, you can use Reqwest to interact with RESTful APIs. Reqwest is a popular Rust library used for making HTTP requests. It provides a convenient interface for sending HTTP requests and interacting with RESTful APIs. The library supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations, making it flexible for different use cases, including web scraping, API integration, or any client-server communication over HTTP.

Here is a simple example of how you might use Reqwest to make GET and POST requests to a RESTful API in Rust:

GET Request Example

use reqwest;
use std::collections::HashMap;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), reqwest::Error> {
    let response = reqwest::get("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1")
        .await?
        .json::<HashMap<String, String>>()
        .await?;

    println!("{:#?}", response);
    Ok(())
}

In this example, we are making an asynchronous GET request to the jsonplaceholder.typicode.com API, which is a fake online REST API for testing and prototyping. We are also deserializing the JSON response into a HashMap.

POST Request Example

use reqwest;
use serde_json::json;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), reqwest::Error> {
    let client = reqwest::Client::new();
    let post_data = json!({
        "title": "foo",
        "body": "bar",
        "userId": 1
    });

    let response = client.post("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts")
        .json(&post_data)
        .send()
        .await?;

    println!("Response: {:?}", response.text().await?);
    Ok(())
}

In this POST request example, we are sending a JSON payload to the same API. We use the json! macro from serde_json to construct the JSON body and then send it using the post method of a reqwest::Client instance.

Remember to add the required dependencies to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
reqwest = { version = "0.11", features = ["json"] }
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
serde_json = "1.0"

The features = ["json"] in the Reqwest dependency enables the JSON support in the Reqwest library. The tokio dependency is for the async runtime, and serde_json is for JSON serialization and deserialization.

Reqwest's API is designed to be ergonomic and easy to use, making it a good choice for interacting with RESTful APIs in Rust.