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| title | menu | weight |
|---|---|---|
| What is Actix | docs_intro | 100 |
Actix is an Ecosystem of Crates
Long ago, actix-web was built on top of actix, a powerful and fast actor system. Now, actix-web is largely unrelated to the actor framework and is built using a different system. Though actix is still maintained, its usefulness as a general tool is diminishing as the futures and async/await ecosystem matures. At this time, the use of actix is only required for WebSocket endpoints.
We call actix-web a powerful 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 production.
Most importantly: actix-web runs on Rust {{< rust-version "actix-web" >}} or later and it works with stable releases.