Installation

Requirements

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV): 1.75

Install or update Rust via rustup:

rustup update stable
rustc --version   # should print 1.75.0 or newer

As a library crate

Add rust-web-server to your Cargo.toml:

cargo add rust-web-server

Or pin the major version manually:

[dependencies]
rust-web-server = "17"

The default feature set (http3) pulls in HTTP/3, HTTP/2, TLS, and a tokio async runtime. If you need a lighter build, opt out and select a lower feature tier (see the feature flags table below).

Prelude

A single glob import covers the types you need in almost every handler:

use rust_web_server::prelude::*;
// Re-exports: App, Server, ConnectionInfo, Request, Response,
//             STATUS_CODE_REASON_PHRASE, Range, MimeType,
//             PathParams, New, routes!

As a standalone binary

Install the rws binary to ~/.cargo/bin:

cargo install rust-web-server
rws --version

Run it in any directory that contains static files and it will serve them on http://localhost:7878 with no configuration file needed.

Build from source

target/release/rws

git clone https://github.com/bohdaq/rust-web-server.git
cd rust-web-server
cargo build --release

To build a specific feature tier from source:

# HTTP/2 + TLS only (no QUIC)
cargo build --release --no-default-features --features http2

# HTTP/1.1 only — no TLS, no async runtime, smallest binary
cargo build --release --no-default-features --features http1

Feature flags

Feature	What it adds	Required deps
http1	Synchronous thread-pool server, no async runtime, no TLS	ctrlc, libc
http2	tokio runtime, TLS via rustls (aws-lc-rs), HTTP/2 via ALPN	h2, rustls, tokio, tokio-rustls, …
http3 (default)	QUIC transport and HTTP/3 on top of http2	quinn, h3, h3-quinn
http-client	HTTPS support in the outbound Client	rustls, webpki-roots
serde	JSON serialization/deserialization via serde	serde, serde_json
auth	HMAC-SHA2 utilities for JWT signing and cookie signing	hmac, sha2
macros	#[derive(Model)] proc-macro for the ORM layer	rws-macros
acme	Automatic TLS certificate provisioning (ACME/Let’s Encrypt)	rcgen, aws-lc-rs, …
tera	Tera template engine integration	tera, serde, serde_json
model-sqlite	ORM backend for SQLite (bundled libsqlite3, no system dep)	rusqlite
model-postgres	ORM backend for PostgreSQL	postgres
model-mysql	ORM backend for MySQL / MariaDB	mysql
crypto	Argon2id password hashing	argon2, rand_core
csrf	CSRF token generation and validation	rand_core
sso	OAuth 2.0 / OIDC SSO support (RSA + ECDSA signing, outbound HTTPS)	rsa, p256, sha2, rand_core, serde, serde_json, http-client

Combining features

Features compose freely. For example, to build HTTP/2 + TLS + JSON + SQLite:

rust-web-server = { version = "17", default-features = false, features = ["http2", "serde", "model-sqlite"] }

Approximate binary sizes

These measurements are for a release build (cargo build --release) of the rws binary with only the core transport feature active. Enabling additional features (serde, tera, ORM backends, etc.) increases the size.

Feature tier	Approx. binary size
http1	~3 MB
http2	~8 MB
http3 (default)	~12 MB

No OpenSSL

TLS uses rustls with the aws-lc-rs crypto backend. There is no dependency on a system OpenSSL installation. Binaries are fully static with respect to TLS and are compatible with FIPS-validated environments.

No third-party HTTP dependencies

HTTP parsing, CORS, MIME types, range requests, WebSocket, SSE, and routing are all implemented from scratch inside this crate. The transitive dependency tree has no hyper, actix-net, or tokio-util.