actix-website/content/docs/getting-started.md

title	menu	weight
Getting Started	docs_basics	130

Getting Started

Let’s write our first actix web application!

Hello, world!

Start by creating a new binary-based Cargo project and changing into the new directory:

cargo new hello-world --bin
cd hello-world

Now, add actix-web as dependencies of your project by ensuring your Cargo.toml contains the following:

[dependencies]
actix-web = "{{< actix-version "actix-web" >}}"

In order to implement a web server, we first need to create a request handler.

A request handler is a function that accepts an HttpRequest instance as its only parameter and returns a type that can be converted into HttpResponse:

Filename: src/main.rs

extern crate actix_web;
use actix_web::{HttpRequest, App, server};

fn index(_req: HttpRequest) -> &'static str {
    "Hello world!"
}

Next, create an Application instance and register the request handler with the application's resource on a particular HTTP method and path and after that, the application instance can be used with HttpServer to listen for incoming connections. The server accepts a function that should return an HttpHandler instance. For simplicity server::new could be used, this function is shortcut for HttpServer::new:

fn main() {
    server::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .resource("/", |r| r.f(index))
    })
       .bind("127.0.0.1:8088").unwrap()
       .run();
}

That's it! Now, compile and run the program with cargo run. Head over to http://localhost:8088/ to see the results.

If you want you can have an automatic reloading server during development that recompiles on demand. To see how this can be accomplished have a look at the autoreload pattern.