Rust Web Programming: A hands-on guide to Rust for modern web development, with microservices and nanoservices

by Maxwell Flitton

Overview

A comprehensive guide to developing, packaging, and deploying Rust web applications – with new coverage on async Rust, WebAssembly, nanoservices, and more. Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in PDF format.

• Get a comprehensive introduction to Rust for full—stack web development
• Explore the exciting evolution of Rust in recent years with WebAssembly, Axum, native TLS, and SurrealDB
• Build code in a scalable way with microservice and nanoservice design patterns

Rust is no longer just for systems programming. This book will show you why this safe and performant language is a crucial up—and—coming option for developing web applications, and get you on your way to building fully functional Rust web apps. You don’t need any experience with Rust to get started, and this new edition also comes with a shallower learning curve. You’ll get hands—on with emerging Rust web frameworks including Actix, Axum, Rocket, and Hyper. You’ll look at injecting Rust into the frontend with WebAssembly and HTTPS configuration with NGINX. Later, you’ll move onto more advanced async topics, exploring TCP and framing, and implementing async systems. As you work through the book, you’ll build a to—do application with authentication using a microservice architecture that compiles into one Rust binary, including the embedding of a frontend JavaScript application in the same binary. The application will have end—to—end atomic testing and a deployment pipeline. By the end of this book, you’ll fully understand the significance of Rust for web development. You’ll also have the confidence to build robust, functional, and scalable Rust web applications from scratch.

• Build scalable Rust web applications as monoliths or microservices
• Develop a deeper understanding of async Rust
• Get to grips with Rust language features like traits and the borrow checker
• Manage authentication and databases in Rust web apps
• Build app infrastructure on AWS using Terraform
• Learn how to package and deploy Rust servers
• Build unit tests and end—to—end tests for your Rust web apps with Python

This book is for web developers who are looking to learn or adopt Rust to build safe and performant web applications. This includes developers familiar with languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. You don’t need any prior experience in Rust to start this book. However, you’ll need a solid understanding of web development principles, along with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to get the most out of it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781835887769
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	01/27/2026
Product dimensions:	75.00(w) x 92.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Maxwell Flitton is a software engineer who works for the open source financial loss modeling foundation OasisLMF. In 2011, Maxwell achieved his Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from the University of Lincoln, UK. While working 12—hour shifts in the A&E departments of hospitals, Maxwell obtained another degree in physics from the Open University in the UK and then moved on to another milestone, with a postgraduate diploma in physics and engineering in medicine from UCL in London. He's worked on numerous projects such as medical simulation soft ware for the German government and supervising computational medicine students at Imperial College London. He also has experience in financial tech and Monolith AI.

Table of Contents

1. A Quick Introduction to Rust
2. Useful Rust Patterns for Web Programming
3. Designing Your Web Application in Rust
4. Async Rust
5. Async Rust
6. Processing HTTP Requests
7. Displaying Content in the Browser
8. Handling HTTP Requests
9. Data Persistence with PostgreSQL
10. Managing User Sessions
11. Building RESTful Services
12. Unit Testing
13. Injecting Rust in the Frontend with WebAssembly
14. Deploying our Application on AWS
15. Configuring Basic HTTPS with NGINX
16. Implementing Native Rust TLS
17. From Microservices to Nanoservices
18. Rocket
19. Axum
20. Exploring the Tokio Framework
21. Rolling our Own HTTP Protocol from TCP with Framing
22. Going One Level Higher with the Hyper Framework
23. Building gRPC Servers
24. Data Persistence with SurrealDB