Wasm Workers Server

Wasm Workers Server (wws) is a framework to develop and run serverless applications server in WebAssembly. These applications are composed by multiple modules called "workers". Each of these tiny modules is in charge of replying to a specific HTTP path in your application.

The server loads the existing Wasm modules and compatible languages in the given path. The filenames and folders determine the final routes that will be served. This is called "filesystem routing" and is a popular technique. Successful frameworks such as NextJS and Eleventy work in this way.

Here you have an example of running the tool:

$ ls .
index.wasm api

$ wws .
⚙️  Loading routes from: .
🗺  Detected routes:
    - http://127.0.0.1:8080/
      => index.wasm (name: default)
    - http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/hello
      => api/hello.js (name: default)
🚀 Start serving requests at http://127.0.0.1:8080

Documentation

All our documentation is available at https://workers.wasmlabs.dev.

Get Started

Wasm Workers Server runs almost anywhere. Thanks to its portability, downloading and running it anywhere is quite simple:

curl -fsSL https://workers.wasmlabs.dev/install | bash && \
  wws --help

You will see the help of the server:

Usage: wws [OPTIONS] [PATH] [COMMAND]

Commands:
  runtimes  Manage the language runtimes in your project
  help      Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Arguments:
  [PATH]  Folder to read WebAssembly modules from [default: .]

Options:
      --host <HOSTNAME>  Hostname to initiate the server [default: 127.0.0.1]
  -p, --port <PORT>      Port to initiate the server [default: 8080]
      --prefix <PREFIX>  Prepend the given path to all URLs [default: ]
  -h, --help             Print help
  -V, --version          Print version

Then, you can download some of our example modules and try them directly:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware-labs/wasm-workers-server/main/examples/js-basic/index.js \
  -o ./index.js && \
  wws .

The server will start immediately:

⚙️  Loading routes from: .
🗺  Detected routes:
    - http://127.0.0.1:8080/
      => index.js (name: default)
🚀 Start serving requests at http://127.0.0.1:8080

Now, open your browser at http://127.0.0.1:8080.

Local installation

By default, our install.sh script will place the wws binary in the /usr/local/bin path. If you want to install it in your current path, you can run the installer with the --local option:

curl -fsSL https://workers.wasmlabs.dev/install | bash -s -- --local && \
  ./wws --help

Running in a container

If you don't want to install anything locally you can just run wws from the ghcr.io/vmware-labs/wws:latest container image. All you need to do is:

• Map a local folder with workers to /app within the container
• Expose port 8080 from the container

Here is how to quickly run a container with an ad-hoc worker from the /tmp/wws-app folder:

mkdir /tmp/wws-app 2>/dev/null;
echo 'addEventListener("fetch", (e) => { return e.respondWith(new Response("Hello from WWS\n"));});' > /tmp/wws-app/index.js;
docker run --rm -v /tmp/wws-app:/app -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/vmware-labs/wws:latest

Language Support

Wasm Workers Server focuses on simplicity. We want you to run workers (written in different languages) safely in WebAssembly. For interpreted languages, we add different interpreters:

Language	Support	Requires an external runtime
Rust	✅	No
JavaScript	✅	No
Ruby	✅	Yes
Python	✅	Yes
...	...	...

To get more information about multi-language support in Wasm Workers Server, check our documentation.

Development

Prerequisites

To work with this project you will need to install:

• Rust
• Make

Run the project

After installing the different prerequisites, you can run the development environment with:

$ cargo run -- --help

This command will run the server and look for .wasm and compatible modules (like .js) in the folder you pass via arguments. Check the examples folder to get more information about creating Wasm workers.

Documentation

• src: includes the source code for the Wasm Workers Server project
• examples: folder to generate different example workers. Check the README file inside to get more information about how to build those