Web APIs with Rust and Actix-web

Class Duration

21 hours of live training delivered over 3-5 days to accommodate your scheduling needs.

Student Prerequisites

Working Rust experience equivalent to Rust Essentials
Familiarity with HTTP and REST is helpful but not required
Comfort with PostgreSQL or another SQL database is recommended

Target Audience

Backend engineers building HTTP services in Rust — internal APIs, public APIs, BFFs in front of LLMs, and high-throughput services where GC pauses or runtime overhead are a problem. Particularly relevant for teams looking for a memory-safe alternative to Go, Node, or Java services without sacrificing developer ergonomics.

Description

This course teaches engineers to build production-ready REST APIs in Rust on the 2024 edition (Rust 1.85 introduced the edition; 1.95+ recommended for the current toolchain) with Actix-web 4. The course covers the full stack: routing and extractors, request handlers, middleware (logging, sessions, error handling), database access with sqlx and PostgreSQL, structured logging and tracing with tracing, testing strategies, containerization, and deployment. Throughout, students use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) the way senior Rust engineers actually use them in 2026 — letting Cargo, clippy, and the compiler be the source of truth while AI handles the routine boilerplate.

Learning Outcomes

Build a production-quality REST API in Rust with Actix-web 4 from scratch.
Define routes, extractors, and request handlers idiomatically.
Apply middleware for logging, sessions, error handling, authentication, and rate limiting.
Connect to PostgreSQL with sqlx, including compile-time-checked SQL and migrations.
Add structured logging and distributed tracing with the tracing crate.
Write integration tests against a real test database and unit tests for handlers and middleware.
Containerize, deploy, and operate the service in production.
Use AI coding assistants effectively for Actix-web development without sacrificing safety or correctness.

Training Materials

All students receive comprehensive courseware covering all topics in the course. Courseware is distributed via GitHub in the form of documentation and extensive code samples. Students practice the topics covered through challenging hands-on lab exercises that build into a complete, deployable Actix-web API capstone.

Software Requirements

A free GitHub account, the latest stable Rust toolchain installed via rustup (Rust 1.95+ on the 2024 edition), Visual Studio Code or another supported editor with the rust-analyzer extension, Docker for the local PostgreSQL instance, curl and/or HTTPie or Postman, and an AI coding assistant of choice (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code). A cloud-based environment can be provided if local installation is restricted.

Training Topics

REST and HTTP in Practice

What REST is and what it isn't in 2026
HTTP methods, status codes, headers, and bodies
URLs, query strings, and path parameters
JSON, form-encoded, and multipart bodies
Working with curl, HTTPie, and Postman

Actix-web 4 Overview

Where Actix-web 4 sits relative to axum, Rocket, Express, FastAPI, and ASP.NET
The actor model and the Actix runtime
Project layout, crates, and feature flags
Running and debugging in VS Code

Routing

Mapping HTTP routes to Rust handlers
Path parameters, query strings, and method routing
Resource trees and route configuration
Versioning your API

Extractors

The extractor model in Actix-web 4
Path, Query, Json, Form, and Bytes extractors
State and shared data
Custom extractors

Request Handlers

The handler lifecycle
The Responder trait and custom responses
Streaming responses
Returning JSON, files, and binary responses

Middleware

The Actix-web middleware model
Logging with tracing and tracing-actix-web
Sessions with actix-session and cookie or Redis backends
Error handling and custom error types with thiserror
Authentication, authorization, and rate limiting
Writing custom middleware

Static Files and Assets

Serving static files with actix-files
Asset bundling and content hashing
Single-page-app fallback routing

Database with sqlx and PostgreSQL

Connecting to PostgreSQL with sqlx
Compile-time-checked SQL queries
Migrations with sqlx-cli
Transactions and connection pooling
Mapping rows to typed structs

Observability

Structured logging with tracing
Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry exporters
Metrics and health checks
Capturing and shipping diagnostics in production

Testing

Integration testing against a real PostgreSQL database
Unit testing handlers, extractors, and middleware
Snapshot tests and golden files
Load testing with oha or wrk

Deployment

Building optimized release binaries
Multi-stage Docker builds
Container registries and image hardening
Hosting considerations: bare metal, VMs, container platforms, edge
Configuration with dotenvy and 12-factor environment variables

AI-Assisted Actix-web Development

The 2026 AI-coding-tool landscape for backend Rust
Prompts that work well for handler scaffolding, extractor design, and middleware
Letting the compiler, clippy, and tests catch what AI gets wrong
Reviewing AI-generated unsafe, unwrap, and unbounded allocations
Agentic Rust workflows: AI-assisted refactors, code review, and CI

Capstone

Build and deploy a complete Actix-web 4 REST API backed by PostgreSQL with sqlx, structured logging, JWT auth, integration tests, a CI pipeline, and a Docker image — built with AI assistance and validated by the compiler, clippy, tests, and a small load test
Course wrap-up and recommended next courses