📦 Rust Chat UI

A small Rust library + binary that serves a pre-built web UI (for example, a Vite/TypeScript dist/ folder).

It can be used:

• as a library inside another Rust server (spawned conditionally)
• as a standalone binary (run directly from CLI)

This crate is ideal if you want a reusable, embeddable UI server.

💡This crate is a Rust wrapper for the release build of chatclient (co-developed with Gemini): https://github.com/guoqingbao/chatclient

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✨ Features

• Serves any static frontend from a dist/ folder (Vite, React, Svelte, Solid, etc.)

• Simple public API (start_ui_server(port, path))

• Run standalone via:

  cargo run --release --bin chatui --ui-port 8080 --api-port 8000

• Async, non-blocking Axum server

• Works well alongside other Axum/Tokio servers

⚡ Install and use globally:

cargo install --path .
# Use local API server
chatui --ui-port 8080 --api-port 8000
# Use remote API server
chatui --ui-port 8080 --server-url http://api.openai.com/v1 --api-key xxxxx

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🚀 Usage as a Standalone Binary

This crate includes a main.rs, so you can run the server directly.

Run on port (8080) and communicate with local (port 8000) API server:

cargo run --release --bin chatui -- --ui-port 8080 --api-port 8000

Run on port (8080) and communicate with remote API server:

cargo run --release --bin chatui -- --ui-port 8080 --server-url http://api.openai.com/v1 --api-key xxxxx

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✨🖥️ Built-in ChatGPT-like UI Features

• 🌞 Light Mode

• 🌙 Dark Mode

• ⚡ Fluent Response

• 🎞️ Animations

• 🧠 Thinking Process (embedded)

• 🗂️ Chat History Storage

• 📈 Token Usage Indicator

• ⚙️ Settings Panel:

  🔑 OpenAI API Compatible Server URL / Key
  🎛️ Sampling Parameters
  🗄️ Context Cache
  📝 Auto Title Generation

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📚 Usage as a Library (Embedded UI Server to your Rust program)

Add to your main server’s Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
rustchatui = { git = "https://github.com/guoqingbao/rustchatui.git", version="0.2.11" }

Then call it conditionally:

use rustchatui::start_ui_server;
use tokio::task;

// Running multiple tasks along with Chat UI Server

```rust
        let app = ... // use arg.port, e.g, 2999
        let mut tasks = Vec::new();
        // Your other tasks
        tasks.push(tokio::spawn(async move {
            if let Err(e) = axum::serve(listener, app).await {
                eprintln!("Chat API server error: {e:?}");
            }
        }));

        if args.ui_server {
            tasks.push(tokio::spawn(async move {
                // Use this crate with another port
                start_ui_server(port as u16, (args.port + 1) as u16, None, None)
                    .await
                    .unwrap();
            }));
        }

        // Run tasks in parallel
        futures::future::try_join_all(tasks)
            .await
            .map_err(candle_core::Error::wrap)?;

Result:

• 🚀 Rust Chat UI server running at http://localhost:3000

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🧠 How It Works

The crate exposes a single function:

async fn start_ui_server(
    ui_port: u16, // Port for this UI web server
    api_port: Option<u16>, // Port for Local API server
    server_url: Option<String>, // Remote API server url: http://api.openai.com/v1
    api_key: Option<String>, // api key for local or remote API server
) -> Result<()> 

This:

• Builds a small Axum server
• Serves the dist/ folder via ServeDir
• Listens on 0.0.0.0:<port>
• Call local server if api_port configured or call remote api server if server_url provided
• Never blocks other async tasks (safe to spawn concurrently)

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📂 Project Structure

rustchatui/
  dist/              <-- Your built frontend (npm run build)
  src/
    lib.rs           <-- start_ui_server()
    main.rs          <-- binary entry point
  Cargo.toml

You may copy your other Web frontend build:

# build your typescript project
npm run build
# copy the dist folder to rustchatui to serve
cp -r dist/ rustchatui/dist/

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🏁 License

MIT — free to use in personal and commercial projects.