Hello Readers! Rust’s Iron framework is a high level web framework which is built in and built for Rust. It is basically built on hyper. It is designed to take advantage of Rust’s greatest features – it’s excellent type system and principled approach to ownership in both single threaded and multi threaded contexts.
Rust’s Iron is highly concurrent and can scale horizontally on more machines behind a load balancer or by running more threads on a more powerful machine. Iron avoids the bottlenecks encountered in highly concurrent code by avoiding shared writes and locking in the core framework.

Lets Start with Hello World
extern crate iron;
use iron::prelude::*;
use iron::status;
fn main() {
Iron::new(|_: &mut Request| {
Ok(Response::with((status::Ok, "Hello World!")))
}).http("localhost:3000").unwrap();
}
Iron is as extensible and pluggable as possible. Iron’s core is concentrated and avoids unnecessary features by leaving them to middleware, plugins, and modifiers.
Iron is extended to new functionality mainly by using Middleware, Plugins, and Modifiers. Most extensions that would be provided by middleware in other web frameworks are instead addressed by the much simpler Modifier and Plugin systems.
Modifiers allow external code to manipulate Requests and Response in a comfortable manner, allowing third-party extensions to get the same treatment as modifiers defined in Iron itself. Plugins allow for loosly – evaluated, automatically cached extensions to Requests and Responses, perfect for parsing, accessing, and otherwise lazily manipulating an http connection.
When it is necessary to modify the control flow of a Request flow, Middleware come into existance, hijack the entire handling of a Request, check an incoming Request, or to do final post-processing. This covers areas such as routing, mounting, static asset serving, final template rendering, authentication, and logging.
Iron comes with only basic modifiers for setting the status, body, and various headers, and the infrastructure for creating modifiers, plugins, and middleware. No plugins or middleware are bundled with Iron.
Installation
If you’re using Cargo
, just add Iron to your Cargo.toml
:
[dependencies.iron]
version = "*"
Iron is 100% safe code :
$ rg unsafe src | wc
0 0 0
Re-exports
pub use request::Request;
The Request
given to all Middleware
.
Stores all the properties of the client’s request plus an TypeMap
for data communication between middleware.
pub use response::Response;
The response representation given to Middleware
pub use error::IronError;
The type of Errors inside and when using Iron.
IronError
informs its receivers of two things:
- What went wrong
- What to do about it
The error
field is responsible for informing receivers of which error occured, and receivers may also modify the error field by layering it (building up a cause chain).
The response
field provides a tangible action to be taken if this error is not otherwise handled.
Modules
error | Iron’s error type and associated utilities. |
headers | Headers container, and common header fields. |
method | HTTP Methods |
middleware | This module contains Iron’s middleware and handler system, the fundamental building blocks for handling HTTP requests and generating responses. |
mime | Re-exporting the mime crate, for convenience. |
modifier | Re-exports from the Modifier crate. |
modifiers | This module defines a series of convenience modifiers for changing Responses. |
prelude | A module meant to be glob imported when using Iron. |
request | Iron’s HTTP Request representation and associated methods. |
response | Iron’s HTTP Response representation and associated methods. |
status | Status Codes |
typemap | Re-exports from the TypeMap crate. |
url | Re-exports from the url crate. |
Type Definitions
IronResult | The Result alias used throughout Iron and in clients of Iron. |
So this was a brush-up for iron framework in rust. Stay connected to explore more such topics. Thank You for reading.
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