Getting Started with Axum – Rust's Most Popular Web Framework (opens in new tab)

Agreed, Rust is super easy for deployment.

I wrote a quick blog post in the past describing what the parent comment is talking about.

https://logankeenan.com/posts/deploy-your-rust-project-to-an...

As a seasoned python developer deployment of a pure Rust program is much simpler than Python. The only issue that I ever had was figuring out how to cross compile for a raspberry pi, but even that took me less time than the typical python dependency problem that may happen when you e.g. devlope on Ubuntu and deploy on Debian.

When Rust deployment gets hairy, it is typically the fault of non-Rust-dependencies.

Similarly for our Go binaries, I build them as full static binaries outside of Docker then just COPY them in. Works pretty seamlessly.

Throw Nginx in front of it like anything else and you’re probably fine.

Or at least I can say - I’ve not experienced issues doing this in an app serving 100m in a day. YMMV etc.

Looking at stats on crates.io for a few frameworks

- axum: 100k installs/day

- warp: 25k installs/day

- actix: 15k installs/day

- rocket: 7k installs/day

- tide: 1k installs/day

(For comparison, hyper - the HTTP library that most web frameworks use under the hood - is at 200k/day, many of which are using it for client rather than server functions. So unless there is another not-hyper-based framework out there, then I’d be moderately confident guessing that axum has >50% of the server market)

Actix used to be the fastest (maybe still is? all the frameworks are so fast it doesn't even matter that much anymore) and most popular framework. Then a bit of drama happened about the hard life of maintaining an OSS project with users criticising you (the usual).

Rocket seemed to gain popularity for a bit but then there was some drama with the maintainer disappearing / not releasing 0.5 for a long time.

Meanwhile, quietly, the guys who did tokio (the most popular async runtime) released axum, which is compatible with tower middlewares. So they had tons of features pretty early.

I switched from actix to axum around 0.4 and updates have been very sensible and kept improving the DX.

Nowadays Axum is at the top for downloads number: https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/

One year ago it was still the standard and I think most production workload still are using actix (we are). When you dig into actix you feel the pre-async decisions (acceptor threads, worker threads, futures not send).

But for a lot of usecases this model is faster than Axum work stealing. I am not a super huge fan of hyper (on which Axum is based), I salute the work (it is impressive) but it is very clunky to use, the code is hard to read and usage is super opiniated.

I think Actix used to be the goto web framework at the time is because it was the most complete, it's still a solid choice. What I think made Axum more popular aside from the features added is that it's part of the tokio-rs projects.

I used to use Actix for a web project, but the Websocket story was severely lacking. Actix is non-work-stealing multi-threaded (to achieve "performance", I presume) and thus it has to use a non-async Actor model for inter-Websocket interactions. This meant that I could not use an async DB pool or an async HTTP requests library within my Websocket code.

Alternatively, Axum is built by the same people that made tokio, is work-stealing multi-threaded, and the Websocket code is async be default. It is just overall a better library.

When I looked into it while starting a new project about a year ago, Axum seemed like the framework with the most inertia. I think there was some concern a year or two back about whether Actix would continue to be maintained, but it looks healthy now.

They're probably both fine choices, I chose Axum because the middleware architecture was easier to grok and at the time I felt that staying under the tokio umbrella would be safer long term.

Tide is fantastic and has IMO the best ergonomics (and could be improved to be even better), except it's essentially abandonware at this point. I'd love to see it continue and thrive, but there's many PR's that have been ready to land for a long time gathering dust, and plenty of open issues that are at a standstill because there's simply no momentum or direction.

Not blaming anyone - the maintainers don't owe us anything - it just wouldn't be my crate of choice if I was starting today. If any of the maintainers read this, shoot me a message because I'd love to help out and get the ball rolling again on tide.