---
title: What is Actix
menu: docs_intro
weight: 100
---

# Actix is an ecosystem of crates

Actix is a few things. The base of it is a powerful actor system for Rust on top of which the
`actix-web` system was originally built. This is what you are most likely going to work with. What
`actix-web` gives you is a powerful and very fast web development framework.

We call `actix-web` a small and pragmatic framework. For all intents and purposes it's a
micro-framework with a few twists. If you are already a Rust programmer you will probably find
yourself at home quickly, but even if you are coming from another programming language you should
find `actix-web` easy to pick up.

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 TLS (HTTPS). This makes it useful for building small services ready for
distribution.

Most importantly: `actix-web` runs on Rust {{< rust-version "actix-web" >}} or later and it works
with stable releases.

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[tokio]: https://tokio.rs