// the find
fairingrey/actix-realworld-example-app
[UNMAINTAINED] Implementation of the RealWorld backend API spec in Actix, Rust's powerful actor system and most fun web framework.
A Rust implementation of the RealWorld spec (a Medium-clone backend) built on an old version of Actix with Diesel for Postgres. It's useful as a reference for how JWT auth, pagination, and CRUD routing were wired up in Actix circa 2019, but the author flagged it unmaintained back in 2021 and says so explicitly in the README.
Full vertical slice of a real API — auth, articles, comments, tags, following — so you can see how all the pieces (Diesel schema, Actix handlers, JWT middleware) fit together rather than a toy snippet. Diesel migrations are broken out per-feature, which makes the schema evolution easy to read. Following the RealWorld spec means you can test it against the standard Postman collection instead of guessing what the API should do.
Pinned to an ancient pre-1.0 Actix API; none of the routing or extractor patterns here match current Actix docs, so it teaches you idioms you'd have to unlearn. No CORS setup, acknowledged in the README, which matters since the whole point of RealWorld is pairing with a frontend. Uses Failure for error handling, a crate deprecated in favor of std::error::Error/anyhow years ago. The author states outright the implementation was never reviewed, so don't treat its security or error-handling choices as vetted.