I Built a Production-Ready Rust Web API Starter Kit (axum-starter)

#rust #webdev #backend #opensource

After 2 years of learning Rust, I finally shipped my first public project.

It's a boilerplate starter kit for building Web API with Rust. The architecture is inspired by NestJS, Spring Boot, and Laravel. I took the best patterns from those and adapted them to work properly in Rust.

GitHub: https://github.com/thomijasir/axum-starter

The Stack

Layer	Technology
Web Framework	Axum 0.8
ORM	Diesel 2.3 (SQLite dev / PostgreSQL prod)
Auth	JWT + Argon2
Docs	OpenAPI / Swagger (dev only)
Logging	Tracing (structured JSON)
IDs	Snowflake (distributed-safe)

Architecture pattern: Controller → Service → Repository. Strict unidirectional. Nothing leaks between layers.

Get Running in 30 Seconds

git clone https://github.com/thomijasir/axum-starter
cd axum-starter
./run.sh dev

Server starts at http://localhost:3099. Swagger UI at http://localhost:3099/spec.

Note: run.sh is the task runner. It auto-loads the correct .env file per environment so you don't set variables manually.

Sample Endpoints Already Wired Up

POST /auth/register
POST /auth/login
POST /auth/refresh
GET  /user/profile
POST /attachment   (file upload with MIME validation)
GET  /spec         (Swagger UI, dev only)

These are sample endpoints. Remove what you don't need, add what you do.

Why I Built This

When I started learning Rust for web API development, there was no solid reference I could follow. Most tutorials stop at "hello world." Nobody shows you how to structure a real project with auth, file uploads, migrations, and proper layering all working together.

So I built the reference I wish I had.

This project is not perfect. I'm sharing it because I need feedback from real developers. If you spot something wrong or something that could be better, please open an issue or PR. I'll be happy to review it.