Getting started with axum

When it comes to picking a production ready, battle tested back-end framework for rust, it really comes down to Axum and Actix-web. Both are great frameworks.

Why?#

I have some beginner level experience with Actix-web, after following along the excellent book by Luca Palmieri, Zero To Production. (I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get started with web development in Rust.)

So why start learning another framework when I already learnt a fair amount about one framework? Well, the eco-system and my interests are more aligned with Axum.

• It is a lighter weight framework which prioritizes modularity and composability.
• It integrates well with tokio (where Actix-web has its own actor system).
• WASM fullstack frameworks like Dyoxus or Leptos work with axum.

How to get started?#

• Axum's repo has a lot of examples, they are really good and cover a lot of common tasks, you would normally need for a production ready web server.
• A more advanced set up, that can help you to take off is the rust-web-app project, Jeremy Chone also has a lot of awesome content on his YouTube channel.

My 2 cents#

I think Axum is a great choice to build solid web servers. Even if you don't know Rust, I think it is a good place to start. It has a lot of good design choices, good learning materials that will help you along the way. The framework helps you quite a lot to write clean, well structured, well modularized code, that is also easy to run in production.