Ironic

Ironic is an experimental, batteries-included application framework for structured Rust APIs on top of Axum. Applications add one dependency and use one CLI; runtime, DI, HTTP, Axum, OpenAPI, testing utilities, configuration, and project generation are all exposed by the ironic crate.

Version 0.1 is a preview and is not yet recommended for production use.

Install the CLI

The CLI ships as the ironic binary in the main crate:

cargo install ironic
ironic new my-api
cd my-api
ironic start

Generate a complete resource with:

ironic generate resource products

Generated applications contain one framework dependency:

[dependencies]
ironic = "0.1"

Minimal application

use ironic::{AxumAdapter, prelude::*};

#[derive(Module)]
#[module()]
struct AppModule;

#[ironic::main]
async fn main() {
    FrameworkApplication::builder()
        .module(AppModule::definition())
        .platform(AxumAdapter::new())
        .build()
        .await
        .expect("application must initialize")
        .listen("127.0.0.1:3000")
        .await
        .expect("application server failed");
}

See the getting-started guide, the REST example, and the release notes.

Publishing

Rust requires procedural macros to live in a proc-macro crate. Therefore ironic-macros is a small implementation companion, while ironic remains the only crate users install or declare. Publish the companion first, then the public crate:

cargo login
cargo publish -p ironic-macros
cargo publish -p ironic

Before publishing, verify exactly what crates.io will receive:

cargo package -p ironic-macros
cargo package -p ironic

Development

Ironic uses Rust 1.85 or newer and Edition 2024.

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace --all-targets
RUSTDOCFLAGS="-D warnings" cargo doc --workspace --all-features --no-deps