Autumn 🍂

Spring Boot-style web framework for Rust, built on Axum.

Autumn assembles proven Rust crates into a convention-over-configuration web stack with proc-macro ergonomics, framework defaults, and customization options when you need them. If Spring Boot, Rails, or Laravel feels familiar, Autumn aims for that same "ship the app, not the plumbing" shape in Rust.

Features

• Route and app macros - #[get], #[post], #[put], #[delete], routes![], #[autumn_web::main]
• Pre-rendering pages to static HTML - #[static_get] + static_routes![] with autumn build pre-rendering to dist/
• Application builder - .routes(), .tasks(), .static_routes(), .scoped(), .merge(), and .nest()
• Configuration and profiles - defaults, autumn.toml, autumn-{profile}.toml, and AUTUMN_* overrides
• Database ergonomics - async Postgres primary/replica pools, Db extractor for the primary/write role, #[model], #[repository], hooks, and embedded migrations
• HTML stack - Maud templating, bundled htmx, Tailwind build pipeline, and static asset serving
• Operations - /health, /actuator/*, structured logging, metrics, and graceful shutdown
• Background work - #[scheduled] tasks, #[job] handlers, one-off #[task] scripts via autumn task, and runtime task visibility at /actuator/tasks
• Companion workflows - Autumn Harvest is the separate durable workflow engine for multi-step orchestration when #[scheduled] or #[job] is not enough
• Transactional email - optional mail feature with Maud templates, log/file/SMTP transports, and a Mailer extractor
• Security primitives - session cookies, auth extractor, security headers, CSRF, and #[secured]
• File storage (optional) - pluggable BlobStore trait with built-in Local and S3-compatible backends, HMAC-signed URLs, and MultipartField::save_to_blob_store (see storage guide)
• CLI workflow - autumn new, autumn setup, autumn dev, autumn build, autumn migrate, autumn console, and autumn task

Quickstart

# Install the published CLI
cargo install autumn-cli --version 0.8.0

# Local development only, from an Autumn checkout:
# cargo install --path autumn-cli

# Create a new project
autumn new my-app
cd my-app

# Optional: download Tailwind CSS for styled builds
autumn setup

# Optional: scaffold a CRUD resource (see docs/guide/generators.md)
# autumn generate scaffold Post title:String body:Text published:bool

# Development server with file watching
autumn dev

# Or run without watch mode
# cargo run

Need to poke at your data? autumn console scaffolds and runs a pre-wired playground binary — same config, same database URL resolution, same pool as the app (see the data playground guide):

autumn console

Visit http://localhost:3000. Autumn also auto-mounts /health, /actuator/health, /actuator/info, and /static/js/htmx.min.js.

Install a prebuilt binary (macOS & Linux)

Get the autumn CLI without compiling from source — no Rust toolchain required:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/trunk-dev/scripts/install.sh | sh

The installer detects your OS and architecture (macOS or Linux, x86_64 or aarch64), downloads the matching prebuilt binary, verifies its sha256 checksum, and installs it to ~/.local/bin/autumn — printing the line to add if that directory isn't on your PATH. Override the target dir with AUTUMN_INSTALL_DIR, or pin a version with AUTUMN_VERSION=vX.Y.Z (or --version vX.Y.Z).

Prefer a manual download? Grab the tarball plus its .sha256:

• Latest: https://github.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/releases/latest/download/autumn-<target>.tar.gz
• Pinned: https://github.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/releases/download/<tag>/autumn-<target>.tar.gz

where <target> is one of x86_64-unknown-linux-musl, aarch64-unknown-linux-musl, x86_64-apple-darwin, or aarch64-apple-darwin (Linux binaries are static musl — no glibc version dependency). Binaries track tagged crate releases (e.g. v0.8.0); latest is the most recent released version — there are no rolling trunk-dev builds.

Install a prebuilt binary (Windows)

Windows ships a native x86_64-pc-windows-msvc build as a .zip (not a tarball). The POSIX install.sh above does not run on Windows; use the PowerShell installer instead:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/trunk-dev/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

It downloads autumn-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip, verifies its sha256 (Get-FileHash), extracts autumn.exe to %LOCALAPPDATA%\autumn\bin, and prints the line to add if that directory isn't on your PATH. Override the install dir with -Dir, or pin a version with -Version vX.Y.Z.

Prefer a manual download? Grab the zip plus its .sha256:

• Latest: https://github.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/releases/latest/download/autumn-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip
• Pinned: https://github.com/autumn-foundation/autumn/releases/download/<tag>/autumn-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip

Verify with Get-FileHash autumn-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip -Algorithm SHA256 and compare against the .sha256 file, then extract autumn.exe and put it on your PATH.

Prefer building from source? cargo install --path autumn-cli still works.

Watching custom directories

autumn dev always watches src/, static/, templates/, and migrations/ plus the project's top-level config files (autumn.toml, Cargo.toml, Cargo.lock, build.rs, tailwind.config.js). To watch additional folders (for example, custom view or locale trees), add a [dev] section to autumn.toml:

[dev]
watch_dirs = ["views", "locales"]

Listed directories are watched recursively in addition to the defaults. Multi-segment paths like content/locales are supported. Changes inside them trigger a server restart and a full browser reload. Paths under target/ and dotted directories are still ignored.

Entries must be project-relative; absolute paths, .. traversal, target, and dotted directories (e.g. .git) are rejected with a warning. Missing directories are skipped at startup.

If you add #[static_get] routes, autumn build pre-renders them into dist/.

Local-Safe vs Production-Safe

Autumn still distinguishes between "works on your laptop" and "safe to run in a multi-replica deployment":

• Local-safe defaults: in-memory sessions, pretty logs in dev, scheduler.backend = "in_process" for #[scheduled], single-binary startup, and no inbound request deadline (so a debugger pause never 503s you).
• Production-safe options: /live, /ready, /startup probes, OTLP telemetry config, Redis-backed sessions, Redis-backed channels/jobs, Postgres-coordinated scheduled tasks, an experimental zero-dependency embedded 2-node cluster (authenticated gossip membership plus an eventually consistent cluster-wide counter — an additional option for a shared counter without standing up Redis, not a production-safe substitute for the backends above and not a leader-election or mutual-exclusion primitive), container scaffolding from autumn new, explicit migration jobs before web replicas roll, and a built-in inbound request timeout (the prod profile smart-defaults server.timeouts.request_timeout_ms = 30000) so a single hung handler returns a clean 503 and frees its worker instead of starving the pool — no hand-written tower layers. Streaming responses (SSE) are never interrupted — the deadline bounds the response head, not the body stream — and WebSocket upgrades are bounded only for the handshake, never the live socket. Any route can override with #[get("/export", timeout_ms = 120000)] or timeout = "off".

Deploys can also carry a proven capacity contract: autumn calibrate measures what a build sustains and records capacity.lock, autumn calibrate --check gates rebuilds against it in CI, and [server] capacity_contract lets the binary admission-control against its own proven envelope instead of a hand-tuned guess (see Capacity Contracts).

If you are deploying beyond a single process, read the Cloud-Native Guide before treating the defaults as done.

Database Topologies

Autumn supports three explicit database shapes:

• Single primary: set database.url or database.primary_url. Writes, transactions, advisory locks, and autumn migrate use that primary role.
• Primary plus read replica: set database.primary_url and database.replica_url, with optional primary_pool_size, replica_pool_size, and replica_fallback = "fail_readiness" or "primary".
• One-shot migrator path: run autumn migrate once against the primary before rolling web replicas. Production web replicas should keep auto_migrate_in_production = false.

database.url and DATABASE_URL remain valid for existing single-URL apps. For new production config, prefer AUTUMN_DATABASE__PRIMARY_URL so the write role is named plainly. autumn doctor --strict reports missing primaries, unsafe production startup migrations, role connectivity failures, and stale replica migrations without printing credentials.

Autumn Harvest

Autumn Harvest is the companion workflow engine for durable, multi-step work: workflow history, activity retries, timers, singleton orchestration, and long-running business processes. It is intentionally a separate release train from autumn-web: Harvest can depend on Autumn Web's AppState and builder surface, but Autumn Web's examples and tests should not need Harvest in order to ship a web release. That keeps the dependency graph pointed in one direction instead of forming a circular release dependency.

Use built-in #[scheduled] tasks and #[job] handlers for lightweight app-local background work. Reach for Harvest when the work needs workflow durability or a dedicated runner. See the Harvest architecture notes for the model and roadmap.

Example

This is the small-app shape Autumn is built around:

use autumn_web::prelude::*;

#[get("/")]
async fn index() -> &'static str {
    "Welcome to Autumn!"
}

#[get("/hello/{name}")]
async fn hello_name(name: autumn_web::extract::Path<String>) -> String {
    format!("Hello, {}!", *name)
}

#[autumn_web::main]
async fn main() {
    autumn_web::app()
        .routes(routes![index, hello_name])
        .run()
        .await;
}

Built On

• Axum - async HTTP routing and middleware
• Diesel + diesel-async - database access
• Maud - compiled HTML templates
• htmx - HTML-first interactivity
• Tailwind CSS - utility-first styling
• Tokio - async runtime
• Tracing - structured logging

Examples

See EXAMPLES.md for the full catalog with personas, journeys, prerequisites, run commands, and success proofs.

Documentation

• Guide index — every guide page, grouped by task — the full table of contents for docs/guide/; the list below is a selection of highlights, not the whole guide
• What's new in 0.8.0 — a walkthrough of the release: simulated networks and build-time query budgets, SQLite as a full backend, Money and ledgered data, mTLS and DNS-01 certificates, shadow deploys, and capability-sandboxed plugins
• What's new in 0.7.0 — a walkthrough of the release: host-preparing deploys and fleets, deterministic simulation testing, the new model attributes, failure-capsule replay, and a request path that allocates ~59% less
• Getting Started Guide
• Authentication — sessions, password policy, login/logout, #[secured], lockout, and remember-me; the hub that links OAuth, step-up, and MFA
• Dev-Loop Latency Budget — p50/p95/max budgets per change class, measurement methodology, and CI gates for autumn dev
• Cache Coherence — autumn cache audit: the build fails when a #[repository] write can leave a #[cached] read stale with no invalidation covering it, turning cache invalidation from a runtime footgun into a compile-time obligation
• Data Classification — #[classified]: a personal-data column is carried as a taint on the type, so returning it from a JSON response without passing a declared declassification boundary is a compile error, and autumn data-flow emits the diffable manifest of which sinks each classified field can reach
• Confidential Fields — #[confidential]: a column sealed client side under a key the server never receives, so the database, backups, logs, replay capsules and the admin UI carry only ciphertext; equality still works through a client-computed blind index, and anything that would make the operator read, compare or group the value fails the build
• Compile-Time Query Budgets — #[query_budget(N)]: the build fails when a handler's reachable paths can exceed its declared query count, catching N+1 regressions on every branch instead of only the ones a test exercises
• The Agent Authority Envelope — #[agent_operable(grant = ...)]: an agent-callable handler's blast radius becomes a compile-time constant, so a write, outbound host, webhook, job or cross-tenant query the declared grant does not allow fails the build, autumn agents manifest --check keeps the diffable record (including MCP tools nothing governs), and every tools/call is audited against what the compiler proved
• The Architecture Graph — autumn graph impact Post: the framework derives a typed graph of the application from the macros that declare it (routes, models, repositories, jobs, plus each route's auth requirement and the tables it touches) and embeds it in the binary, so impact analysis is a query rather than a full-codebase read, /actuator/graph answers from the running process, and autumn graph show --check fails the build when a declared element or an edge quietly disappears
• Generated UI (Constela) — serve an interface a language model wrote: the Constela constrained JSON UI language is parsed, validated against an allowlist of tags, attributes and URL schemes, and server-rendered to Maud, with element ids prefixed so a generated fragment cannot clobber the host page; Document::dispatch runs an action's pure state steps on the server so the interaction loop works over htmx with no client runtime, and browser-side steps such as fetch are reported as effects for the app to allow or decline rather than performed
• Signed Webhook Intake — webhooks arriving in: verifying a sender's signature, replay protection, and the intake route
• Outbound Signed Webhooks — sending outbound webhooks out to endpoints your own users/customers register: WebhookSubscription, WebhookOutboundManager::dispatch(), the retrying autumn_webhook_delivery job, and dead-letter inspection and replay under /actuator/webhooks/*
• Billing — autumn-billing: Stripe checkout and portal, a webhook-fed local mirror, the Entitled<Plan> gate, and durable dunning retries
• Money and the Ledger — typed Money<C>, currency-safe arithmetic and rounding, and the append-only double-entry ledger with idempotent posting that commits inside your Db::tx
• Platform Support — the Windows tier policy: which commands run natively, which need WSL2, and the windows-latest CI job that gates the native journey
• Docs Smoke Procedure - release gate for first-run docs
• Release Checklist
• Code Generators — autumn generate model | migration | scaffold
• Data Playground — autumn console, the pre-wired edit-and-run answer to rails console
• One-Off Tasks - #[task], one_off_tasks![], and autumn task
• Embedded Clustering — zero-dependency two-node clustering: [cluster] config, authenticated gossip membership, the cluster-wide CRDT counter via ClusterHandle, and the cluster:membership health indicator
• Multi-Replica Scheduled Tasks - #[scheduled] with Postgres advisory-lock coordination
• Fleet Deploys — [deploy] hosts: autumn deploy up rolls a release across several VPS hosts one at a time (per-host blue/green, migrations exactly once, halt-and-roll-back on failure), plus deploy status drift detection, fleet maintenance, and the load-balancer contract
• Data-Retention Sweeps — retention(...) on #[repository(...)]: batched, soft-delete-aware, fleet-coordinated auto-purge, plus autumn retention --dry-run
• Data Retention for Framework-Owned Data — one [retention] section that bounds every table Autumn creates (job history, tracking, idempotency, experiment assignments, webhook replay, sessions, audit archives), enforced by an in-process fleet-coordinated sweep, GDPR legal-hold aware, with autumn db retention --dry-run
• Data Scrubbing — autumn db scrub: turn a production backup into an anonymized staging copy, with fail-closed PII classification driven by #[encrypted] columns, GDPR anonymize registrations, and a checked-in scrub.toml
• Horizontal Sharding — [[database.shards]], slot-based routing, ShardedDb/Shards extractors, per-shard health and migrations
• Cooperative Tenant Scratch Memory — typed TenantArena scratch allocations with a tracked soft quota and deterministic final-drop reclamation; not hard isolation or an arbitrary-heap/RSS bound
• Operating Background Jobs - admin dashboard and recovery actions for #[job]
• OpenAPI Spec Generation — the spec Autumn derives from your handlers, #[api_doc(...)], #[derive(OpenApiSchema)], Swagger UI, and the production profile gate
• Exposing Your API as MCP Tools — project typed endpoints into a Model Context Protocol server with #[api_doc(mcp)] + mount_mcp
• Mail Guide
• Widget Stories — the /_stories widget gallery and the story! macro
• Active Search & Autocomplete — a search box whose results appear as you type, and typeahead/autocomplete pickers that store the chosen record's ID, via active_search and autocomplete_input; built on htmx and server-rendered Maud fragments, so you write no JavaScript of your own — active search needs htmx, and autocomplete selection also needs the shipped /static/js/autumn-widgets.js runtime. Both degrade without scripting, but differently: active search emits a self-contained <noscript> search form, while autocomplete emits a <noscript> <select> that has to sit inside your own form
• View Formatting Helpers — number_to_currency, pluralize, truncate, time_ago_in_words, and friends for Maud templates
• Per-User Time Zones — rendering timestamps in each user's own time zone: the TimeZone extractor resolving their IANA zone, set_time_zone_in_session, local_datetime, and pairing it with the Clock extractor so date/time rendering stays deterministic and test-injectable
• Cloud-Native Guide
• Capacity Contracts
• Logging: levels, format & PII
• Failure Capsules — [failure_capture] records a failing request, its database traffic and its clock reads as one replayable file; autumn replay re-runs it offline
• Edge Capsules — #[edge] compiles read-path routes into a portable wasm32-wasip1 artifact a CDN can run, byte-identical to the origin and falling back to it for anything the edge cannot serve (experimental)
• Wire Contracts — #[endpoint] turns a typed handler into a contract, wire_client! generates the caller's typed client from it, and #[contract_checked] fails the caller's build at the call site when a request or response field the caller actually reads or sets stops matching — including the two breaks the type checker cannot see, a new required field behind ..Default::default() and a serde-skipped field (experimental)
• Sandboxed Plugins — install an unaudited third-party plugin as a capability-sandboxed wasm32-wasip1 artifact: one declared prefix, no filesystem/network/env/database, hard CPU and memory ceilings, and a trap that is a 5xx on its own prefix instead of a dead process (experimental)
• Todo Tutorial
• Autumn Harvest Architecture Notes
• API Reference
• Pre-rendering Design Notes
• Stability Policy — SemVer, MSRV, and migration commitments
• Upgrading — autumn upgrade applies each release's mechanical API migrations to your own code and reconciles your project's framework-owned scaffold files (Dockerfile, build.rs, CI workflow, toolchain configs) against the current release, after showing you the diff; files you edited are flagged as conflicts rather than overwritten, --check exits nonzero on drift for CI, and everything it cannot safely rewrite is listed with file:line and a guide link
• Transition effects — per-edge on / on_commit side effects on #[state_machine] transitions.
• Counter Caches — #[belongs_to(Post, counter_cache)] keeps posts.comment_count current atomically, in the same transaction, with an idempotent recompute for drift
• Maintained Derived Read Models — #[derivation(Post, column = "published_comment_count", filter = published)] keeps a filtered count or weighted sum(field) on the parent current in the same transaction, with a content-addressed definition hash, a resumable backfill and /actuator/derivations for state and drift
• Votes, Likes and Reactions — #[votable(by = ..., aggregate = sum|count)], the race-safe react() / reaction_of() helpers, and the no-JS reaction_controls widget
• SEO — seo(...) on any route macro plus the SeoMeta extractor, canonical URLs, robots = "noindex" and its sitemap exclusion, SitemapSource, and the auto-mounted /sitemap.xml + /robots.txt
• Forms, Validation and Normalization — the ChangesetForm round-trip that re-renders a rejected submission with the user's input and inline errors, Valid<T> / Validated<T> for API endpoints, model-level #[validate(...)], #[normalize(trim, downcase, …)] and where it runs on the write path, htmx inline validation and its automatic no-JavaScript fallback
• Extractors — the full extractor catalog, the two ordering rules, writing your own, and Query<T>'s structured decoding: repeated keys, tags[], tags[0], filter[status] and items[0][sku] all decode into typed sequences and nested structs
• Cookie Consent — the Consent gate that is the actual compliance (not the banner), inject_consent_banner, the strictly-necessary exemption, policy-version re-prompting, and the GDPR Art. 7(3) withdraw flow
• Threaded Comments on Anything — #[commentable], the polymorphic (commentable_type, commentable_id) association, add_comment() / comment_thread() / delete_comment(), the registry-driven comment router, and the no-JS comment_thread widget

Stability

Autumn commits to Semantic Versioning for its public API starting at 1.0.0. See STABILITY.md for the full definition of the stable surface, the MSRV policy, and the migration-guide process for future major releases.

Until 1.0.0, Autumn is in its 0.x series — see the pre-1.0 notes for what that means in practice.

Requirements

• Rust 1.88.0+ (edition 2024)
• PostgreSQL for database-backed apps

Autumn can still run without a database if you omit the [database] section.

Platform support

Develop on macOS, Linux, or Windows; deploy on Linux.

On Windows the core journey — autumn new, doctor, setup, dev, test, foreground serve, and managed Postgres — is Tier 1: works natively, and a windows-latest CI job walks that whole journey on every pull request. The Unix-native slices — the autumn serve --daemon lifecycle, the autumn deploy actions that reach a host over SSH, and the bash contributor gate scripts — are Tier 2: supported via WSL2, and fail fast on native Windows with an error naming the policy rather than half-working.

See Platform support for the full command-by-command policy, the Windows prerequisites autumn doctor flags, and how to run the Tier 2 commands under WSL2.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0