Actix Web - Web Server Framework¶

This is a web framework layered on actix as very fast development framework for web based services and brings the actor model to the web.

An application developed with actix-web will expose an HTTP server contained within a native executable. You can either put this behind another HTTP server like Nginx or serve it up as-is. Even in the complete absence of another HTTP server actix-web is powerful enough to provide HTTP 1 and HTTP 2 support as well as SSL/TLS. Also WebSockets, steaming responses, graceful shutdown, cookie support, static file serving, and good testing infrastructure are readily available out of the box.

The key facts are:

• request handler functions which gets a request and returns a response
• application instance which registers the request handler with a route
• main function which starts the server

Most part of this abstract comes from the Actix Web documentation.

Application¶

The application instance is the central element. It is used for registering routes for resources and middleware. It also stores application state shared across all handlers within same application.

The server can be run with multiple applications.

fn index(req: &HttpRequest) -> impl Responder {
    "Hello world!"
}

let app = App::new()
    .prefix("/app")
    .resource("/index.html", |r| r.method(Method::GET).f(index))
    .finish()

The prefix is used for the whole application if set. So in the above the index function is invoked using /app/index.html on the server.