Actix web

Actix web is a small, fast, down-to-earth, open source rust web framework.

use actix_web::*;

fn index(req: HttpRequest) -> String {
    format!("Hello {}!", &req.match_info()["name"])
}

fn main() {
    HttpServer::new(
        || Application::new()
            .resource("/{name}", |r| r.f(index)))
        .serve::<_, ()>("127.0.0.1:8080");
}

Documentation

• User Guide
• API Documentation (Development)
• API Documentation (Releases)
• Cargo package: actix-web
• Minimum supported Rust version: 1.20 or later

Features

• Supported HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2.0 protocols
• Streaming and pipelining
• Keep-alive and slow requests handling
• WebSockets
• Transparent content compression/decompression (br, gzip, deflate)
• Configurable request routing
• Multipart streams
• Middlewares (Logger, Session, DefaultHeaders)
• Built on top of Actix.

HTTP/2

Actix web automatically upgrades connection to http/2 if possible.

Negotiation

HTTP/2 protocol over tls without prior knowlage requires tls alpn. At the moment only rust-openssl supports alpn.

[dependencies]
actix-web = { git = "https://github.com/actix/actix-web", features=["alpn"] }

Upgrade to http/2 schema described in rfc section 3.2 is not supported. Starting http/2 with prior knowledge is supported for both clear text connection and tls connection. rfc section 3.4

tls example

Benchmarks

This is totally unscientific and probably pretty useless. In real world business logic would dominate on performance side. But in any case. i took several web frameworks for rust and used theirs hello world example. All projects are compiled with --release parameter. I didnt test single thread performance for iron and rocket. As a testing tool i used wrk and following commands

wrk -t20 -c100 -d10s http://127.0.0.1:8080/

wrk -t20 -c100 -d10s http://127.0.0.1:8080/ -s ./pipeline.lua --latency -- / 128

I ran all tests on localhost on MacBook Pro late 2017. It has 4 cpu and 8 logical cpus. Each result is best of five runs. All measurements are req/sec.

Name	1 thread	1 pipeline	3 thread	3 pipeline	8 thread	8 pipeline
Actix	81.400	710.200	121.000	1.684.000	106.300	2.206.000
Gotham	61.000	178.000
Iron					94.500	78.000
Rocket					95.500	failed
Shio	71.800	317.800
tokio-minihttp	106.900	1.047.000

Some notes on results. Iron and Rocket got tested with 8 threads, which showed best results. Gothan and tokio-minihttp seem does not support multithreading, or at least i couldn't figured out. I manually enabled pipelining for Shio and Gotham*. While shio seems support multithreading, but it showed absolutly same results for any how number of threads (maybe macos?) Rocket completely failed in pipelined tests.

Examples

• Basic
• Stateful
• Mulitpart streams
• Simple websocket session
• Tcp/Websocket chat
• SockJS Server

License

Actix web is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.