Authentication, sessions, audit trails, and recovery are designed as one system, not assembled as separate parts.
Postgres only. No build step. Single binary deployment.
30-second example
An admin surface is one derive, one impl, one register call.
// accept every default
let admin = new.;
let router = register_admin_routes;
new.run.await?;
A model that wants more control fills in the ModelAdmin body:
Why RustIO exists
Three observations shape the framework.
CRUD is the surface
The weight of production administrative work sits underneath — authority transitions, session lifecycle, recovery, audit chains.
RustIO treats these as first-class concerns.
Doctrine before implementation
Authentication, recovery, session invalidation, and audit behaviour are governed by checked-in contract documents.
Pull requests are reviewed against the doctrine, not only against the implementation diff.
Operational clarity over flexibility
The framework targets one database, ships one stylesheet, and requires no build step.
Authority, sessions, recovery, and audit receive the engineering attention. The rest stays intentionally simple.
The framework surface stays intentionally narrow so the security-sensitive paths remain reviewable.
Core principles
The invariants the framework refuses to break.
Doctrine 22 Session invalidation has a single writer.
Uniform outward responses Recovery and login surfaces collapse every failure mode into a single response shape.
Audit-by-default Every authority mutation emits a typed
AuditEvent.
No plaintext at rest Argon2id for passwords. SHA-256 for session and reset tokens.
What's in the box
The surface is grouped into five concerns.
Admin surface
#[derive(RustioAdmin)]on a struct generates list, create, edit, and delete pages.impl ModelAdminoverrides defaults —list_display,list_filter,search_fields,ordering,list_per_page.- Per-model RBAC over a five-tier role hierarchy.
Identity and sessions
- DB-backed sessions with Argon2id passwords.
- Hashed-at-rest session tokens.
- Centralised invalidation through
auth::sessions::invalidate_sessions.
Recovery
- Self-service forgot and reset.
- Admin-driven password reset, lock, unlock, and revoke.
- Auto-throttle on failed logins.
- Re-auth wall for destructive admin actions.
Audit and observability
- Typed
AuditEventwith stable string identifiers. - Per-request correlation IDs.
- Redaction helpers for tokens and passwords.
Operational
- Postgres-only. Hyper, sqlx, and minijinja under the hood.
- Single binary deploy. No build step. One stylesheet.
- Project templates and CSS embedded at compile time.
Visual design
- Hand-written CSS driven by
--rio-*custom-property tokens. rio-theme(build-time companion crate) generates a safetokens.cssfrom one or more brand colors — WCAG-checked, vivid colors auto-tamed, brand-vs-semantic-state collisions resolved.- v0.19 "Quiet Expert" design language: unified
.rio-section,.rio-empty-state,.rio-confirm, kebab row actions, area-chart sparklines. SeeCHANGELOG.md[0.19.0]for the per-page record.
Most projects use a subset. The framework does not require adopting all of it.
Install
The library and the CLI ship as separate crates.
[]
= "0.23.0"
= { = "1", = ["macros", "rt-multi-thread"] }
= { = "0.4", = ["serde"] }
Documentation
Full documentation index: docs/README.md.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
docs/ |
Guides, doctrine, architecture overview. |
docs/design/ |
Long-form design contracts — one file per security-sensitive subsystem. |
docs/public-api.md |
Enumerated public API surface (generated; descriptive, not normative). |
docs/archive/ |
Historical and superseded planning material. |
Reading paths
Where to start depends on the work.
New to the framework
→ 30-second example above
→ docs/getting-started.md
→ DESIGN_SYSTEM.md
Working on authentication or recovery
→ DESIGN_RECOVERY.md
→ DESIGN_R2_ORGANISATIONAL.md
Auditing authority boundaries
→ DESIGN_AUDIT.md
→ DESIGN_SESSIONS.md
Building on the published crate
→ Install above
→ docs/modeladmin.md
→ examples/clinic/
Understanding scope and design history
→ docs/architecture.md
→ STRATEGIC_RESET_PLAN.md
→ CHANGELOG.md
Doctrine documents
Security-sensitive behaviour is governed by explicit contract documents reviewed alongside the code.
DESIGN_SYSTEM.md
Visual, token, and branding contract.
DESIGN_SESSIONS.md
Session lifecycle, trust escalation, and Doctrine 22 — the
single-writer invariant on revoked_at.
DESIGN_AUDIT.md
Typed audit events, correlation-id chains, and the required middleware ordering.
DESIGN_RECOVERY.md
Self-service password recovery (R1, ships in 0.5.0).
DESIGN_R2_ORGANISATIONAL.md
Admin-driven recovery, auto-throttle, re-auth wall (R2, ships in 0.6.0).
Each document is the source of truth for its surface.
Workspace layout
Four crates ship together. The split keeps proc-macros, the theme engine, and CLI compilation off the project's hot path.
| Crate | Purpose |
|---|---|
rustio-admin |
The library. Re-exports the macros. |
rustio-admin-macros |
Proc-macros (re-exported from rustio-admin). |
rustio-admin-cli |
The rustio-admin binary — new (friendly alias for startproject), startproject, startapp, migrate, user, group, perm, theme, doctor, docs, builder new. |
rio-theme |
Build-time theme engine. Turns raw brand colors into a WCAG-safe tokens.css. Not depended on by rustio-admin at runtime. |
Non-goals
RustIO is intentionally narrow in scope.
- Not a general-purpose web framework.
- Not an ORM. The
Modeltrait is a thin sqlx shim. - Not a content management system.
- Not AI-augmented.
- Not multi-database. Postgres only, by design.
- Not schema-contract-driven.
CLI
See docs/cli.md for the full command reference.
Naming — what about rustio?
There's a separate project at rustio — a strict-by-construction system builder with SQLite, a guided schema-evolution wizard (rustio evolve), and an admin UI. Through rustio-admin's v0.21.x line, this project also shipped a CLI binary called rustio, which meant cargo install rustio-admin-cli and cargo install rustio-cli silently overwrote each other in ~/.cargo/bin.
As of v0.22.0 the binary published by this project is named rustio-admin, so the two no longer collide. You can install both on the same machine; rustio-admin always means this project, rustio always means the other.
The two are different in scope — this project (rustio-admin) targets Postgres-only admin panels with a narrow, doctrine-governed surface; the sibling project layers an admin UI, an ORM, and a guided schema-evolution wizard over a strict typed core with SQLite. Same name prefix, different goals.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.