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Beacon termination

Platform:

Fastly Compute

Language:

Rust

Repo:

https://github.com/fastly/compute-starter-kit-rust-beacon-termination

Use this starter

Using the Fastly CLI, create a new project using this starter somewhere on your computer:

$ fastly compute init --from=https://github.com/fastly/compute-starter-kit-rust-beacon-termination

Or click the button below to create a GitHub repository, provision a Fastly service, and set up continuous deployment:

What are beacons?

Beacons are HTTP requests, usually POSTs, sent from a web browser to record some analytics data. Browsers offer native support for beacons via the navigator.sendBeacon method, and via the Reporting API for out-of-band reports on browser-generated warnings like CSP and feature policy violations, deprecations, browser interventions, and network errors. Native apps will also often send beacon data back to base.

For an in-depth guide to beacon termination using VCL, see the Beacon Termination tutorial.

Features

• Exposes a POST /reports endpoint to receive beacon reports (in batches)
• Deserializes individual reports from JSON to Rust data structures, with optional type-checking (see Payload examples)
• Enriches the data with information available at the edge, e.g. by adding geo data
• Sends reports to a logging endpoint as individual JSON lines N.B.: Depending on which logging endpoint type is chosen, these lines may be batched.
• Responds with a synthetic 204

Payload examples

This starter kit allows an individual report to be any valid JSON value.

For optional type-checking, it also includes the data structures for some common report payloads. These structures can be imported from modules following the example_... naming convention:

• CSP Violations

  mod example_csp_violation;
  use crate::example_csp_violation::ReportBody;

• Network Errors

  mod example_network_error_log;
  use crate::example_network_error_log::ReportBody;

• Core Web Vitals

  mod example_core_web_vital;
  use crate::example_core_web_vital::ReportBody;

  Tip: Use the web-vitals JavaScript library to measure all the Core Web Vitals.

Requirements

The following resources need to exist on your active Fastly service version for this starter kit to work:

• A logging endpoint called reports.

Next steps

Starters are a good way to bootstrap a project. For more specific use cases, and answers to common problems, try our library of code examples.