Writing an Application

actix-web provides various primitives to build web servers and applications with Rust. It provides routing, middleware, pre-processing of requests, post-processing of responses, etc.

All actix-web servers are built around the App instance. It is used for registering routes for resources and middleware. It also stores application state shared across all handlers within the same scope.

An application’s scope acts as a namespace for all routes, i.e. all routes for a specific application scope have the same url path prefix. The application prefix always contains a leading “/” slash. If a supplied prefix does not contain leading slash, it is automatically inserted. The prefix should consist of value path segments.

For an application with scope /app, any request with the paths /app, /app/, or /app/test would match; however, the path /application would not match.

use actix_web::{web, App, HttpServer, Responder};

async fn index() -> impl Responder {
    "Hello world!"
}

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new().service(
            // prefixes all resources and routes attached to it...
            web::scope("/app")
                // ...so this handles requests for `GET /app/index.html`
                .route("/index.html", web::get().to(index)),
        )
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

In this example, an application with the /app prefix and a index.html resource are created. This resource is available through the /app/index.html url.

For more information, check the URL Dispatch section.

State

Application state is shared with all routes and resources within the same scope. State can be accessed with the web::Data<T> extractor where T is the type of the state. State is also accessible for middleware.

Let’s write a simple application and store the application name in the state:

use actix_web::{get, web, App, HttpServer};

// This struct represents state
struct AppState {
    app_name: String,
}

#[get("/")]
async fn index(data: web::Data<AppState>) -> String {
    let app_name = &data.app_name; // <- get app_name

    format!("Hello {}!", app_name) // <- response with app_name
}

and pass in the state when initializing the App, and start the application:

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .data(AppState {
                app_name: String::from("Actix-web"),
            })
            .service(index)
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

Any number of state types could be registered within the application.

Shared Mutable State

HttpServer accepts an application factory rather than an application instance. An HttpServer constructs an application instance for each thread. Therefore, application data must be constructed multiple times. If you want to share data between different threads, a shareable object should be used, e.g. Send + Sync.

Internally, web::Data uses Arc. Thus, in order to avoid creating two Arcs, we should create our Data before registering it using App::app_data().

In the following example, we will write an application with mutable, shared state. First, we define our state and create our handler:

use actix_web::{web, App, HttpServer};
use std::sync::Mutex;

struct AppStateWithCounter {
    counter: Mutex<i32>, // <- Mutex is necessary to mutate safely across threads
}

async fn index(data: web::Data<AppStateWithCounter>) -> String {
    let mut counter = data.counter.lock().unwrap(); // <- get counter's MutexGuard
    *counter += 1; // <- access counter inside MutexGuard

    format!("Request number: {}", counter) // <- response with count
}

and register the data in an App:

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let counter = web::Data::new(AppStateWithCounter {
        counter: Mutex::new(0),
    });

    HttpServer::new(move || {
        // move counter into the closure
        App::new()
            // Note: using app_data instead of data
            .app_data(counter.clone()) // <- register the created data
            .route("/", web::get().to(index))
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

Using an Application Scope to Compose Applications

The web::scope() method allows setting a resource group prefix. This scope represents a resource prefix that will be prepended to all resource patterns added by the resource configuration. This can be used to help mount a set of routes at a different location than the original author intended while still maintaining the same resource names.

For example:

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() {
    let scope = web::scope("/users").service(show_users);
    App::new().service(scope);
}

In the above example, the show_users route will have an effective route pattern of /users/show instead of /show because the application’s scope argument will be prepended to the pattern. The route will then only match if the URL path is /users/show, and when the HttpRequest.url_for() function is called with the route name show_users, it will generate a URL with that same path.

Application guards and virtual hosting

You can think of a guard as a simple function that accepts a request object reference and returns true or false. Formally, a guard is any object that implements the Guard trait. Actix-web provides several guards. You can check the functions section of the API docs.

One of the provided guards is Header. It can be used as a filter based on request header information.

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .service(
                web::scope("/")
                    .guard(guard::Header("Host", "www.rust-lang.org"))
                    .route("", web::to(|| HttpResponse::Ok().body("www"))),
            )
            .service(
                web::scope("/")
                    .guard(guard::Header("Host", "users.rust-lang.org"))
                    .route("", web::to(|| HttpResponse::Ok().body("user"))),
            )
            .route("/", web::to(|| HttpResponse::Ok()))
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

Configure

For simplicity and reusability both App and web::Scope provide the configure method. This function is useful for moving parts of the configuration to a different module or even library. For example, some of the resource’s configuration could be moved to a different module.

use actix_web::{web, App, HttpResponse, HttpServer};

// this function could be located in a different module
fn scoped_config(cfg: &mut web::ServiceConfig) {
    cfg.service(
        web::resource("/test")
            .route(web::get().to(|| HttpResponse::Ok().body("test")))
            .route(web::head().to(|| HttpResponse::MethodNotAllowed())),
    );
}

// this function could be located in a different module
fn config(cfg: &mut web::ServiceConfig) {
    cfg.service(
        web::resource("/app")
            .route(web::get().to(|| HttpResponse::Ok().body("app")))
            .route(web::head().to(|| HttpResponse::MethodNotAllowed())),
    );
}

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .configure(config)
            .service(web::scope("/api").configure(scoped_config))
            .route("/", web::get().to(|| HttpResponse::Ok().body("/")))
    })
    .bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?
    .run()
    .await
}

The result of the above example would be:

/         -> "/"
/app      -> "app"
/api/test -> "test"

Each ServiceConfig can have its own data, routes, and services.

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