Building a Local Tools Web Server in Rust - Let's Code

September 2025

Introduction

I've got a public website with tools on it. It's great, but it's static. Meaning I can't use it to capture bookmarks or update my site. That takes a dynamic server. This is a live coding series where I make one.

Part 2 Notes

Took a quick look at Rocket to compare it to Axum and confirmed that Axum is the way I want to go.
Tried to use axum_flash for flash messages. Took a while to figure out that it won't work because it hasn't been updated to the latest version of Axum
Ended up using axum_messages. The docs said to add version 0.7.0 to cargo.toml. That's out of date. Needed to be 0.8.0. Took a while to figure that out. Got stuff moving after figuring that out.

Part 1 Notes

Starting with a new repo and cargo init
Got axum spun up to serve a hello world page
Got part way through adding hot reloading but backed out of it. YAGNI right now
Figured out basic GET and POST handling including parsing the FORM data (which isn't an example in the docs)

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