Crowdmapper

Crowdmapper is a Rusty take on self-hosted crowdmapping 🦀🚀

The frontend is written with reactive Leptos using client-side rendering and Trunk as build tool.

The backend is written with axum to drive HTTP, and optionally both sqlx (currently only with postgres support) and minio for persistent data and file storage respectively.

Building from source

Requirements

• Rust nightly (tested on 1.95.0-nightly)
• Trunk (tested on v0.21.14, installation guide)

Frontend

To build the frontend, use trunk build:

trunk build --config frontend/Trunk.toml

This outputs all necessary assets to serve the frontend statically in frontend/dist/.

Backend

The backend can simply be built with cargo build:

cargo build -p backend

However, this only includes a memory store. For persistent storage, enable the postgres feature with:

cargo build -p backend -F postgres

Development

Requirements

• Docker
• Docker Compose
• watchexec (tested on v2.3.2, installation guide)

Frontend

Use trunk to serve a development server (handles livereload and API proxying for you) with:

trunk serve --config frontend/Trunk.toml

Which can be viewed at http://localhost:8080/.

Backend

Use watchexec to watch the backend/ directory for changes to .rs and .toml files with:

CROWDMAPPER_JWT_SECRET=abc watchexec -r -w backend -e rs,toml -- cargo run -p backend

Note

The CROWDMAPPER_JWT_SECRET environment variable is required as a security measure.

The backend only ships with support for a memory store by default. To enable persistence, it may be run with the postgres feature:

CROWDMAPPER_JWT_SECRET=abc watchexec -r -w backend -e rs,toml -- cargo run -p backend -F postgres

Integration

Backend

To test and verify that the persistence works correctly, you can easily deploy a development data-/object-store with:

docker compose up

This will expose a PostgreSQL instance on localhost:5432 and a MinIO instance on localhost:9000 (and a corresponding admin console on http://localhost:9001).

Once both of these are running, you can start developing with:

CROWDMAPPER_DATABASE_URL=postgres://crowdmapper:crowdmapper@localhost:5432/crowdmapper CROWDMAPPER_JWT_SECRET=abc watchexec -r -w backend -e rs,toml -- cargo run -p backend -F postgres

The minio-init service of compose.yaml will create a photos bucket for you in the minio container. The first time you run the backend, sqlx will migrate the postgres tables.

The default username and password for both minio and postgres is crowdmapper. To access these directly from your terminal, you can use the terminal-based psql utility with:

psql postgres://crowdmapper:crowdmapper@localhost:5432/crowdmapper

And MinIO Client (mc) with:

$ mc alias set crowdmapper http://localhost:9000 crowdmapper crowdmapper
$ mc ls bs crowdmapper
[2026年02月04日 22:21:14 CET] 0B photos/

Frontend

To initialize the access token context of the frontend with access to http://localhost:8080/photos and the ability to upload new ones at http://localhost:8080/photos/upload, you can pass TRUNK_CROWDMAPPER_INIT_ACCESS_TOKEN as an environment variable to trunk serve like so:

TRUNK_CROWDMAPPER_INIT_ACCESS_TOKEN=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiIxYmVlYzU3ZS0xNTcwLTQ2MWEtYjhkOS03OTcwZDRjZGM1ODQiLCJwaG8iOjE1LCJleHAiOjQxMDI0NDEyMDB9._TOtEzIyJe7a11dmPLr1ZwTfV3HTyuqsL5dtEiK2zaQ trunk serve --config=./frontend/Trunk.toml

This works because the JWT has the following claims:

{
 "sub": "1beec57e-1570-461a-b8d9-7970d4cdc584",
 "pho": 15,
 "exp": 4102441200
}

and is signed with the same JWT secret as is passed to the backend with CROWDMAPPER_JWT_SECRET.

Git Hooks

It is recommended that you run:

git config --local core.hooksPath .githooks/

after cloning. This will run .githooks/pre-commit prior to each commit which will check formatting, and run linting and tests for all features. You need to install leptosfmt for this to work.