// the find
loco-rs/loco
🚂 🦀 The one-person framework for Rust for side-projects and startups
Loco is a Rails-style full-stack web framework for Rust, built on top of Axum and SeaORM. It gives you generators, background jobs, mailers, scheduled tasks, and file storage out of the box — the goal is to let one developer ship a production app without assembling a dozen crates by hand. Best fit for Rust developers who want Rails ergonomics without leaving the language.
The generator tooling (loco-gen) is genuinely solid — scaffold a full CRUD resource with model, migration, controller, and tests in one command, and the snapshot tests mean regressions in generated code get caught. Axum underneath means you're not trading performance for convenience; you get proper async, tower middleware compatibility, and the existing Axum ecosystem. The worker abstraction handles both Redis-backed queues and in-process tokio tasks behind the same trait, so you can start cheap and graduate to a real queue without rewriting. The starter templates are opinionated in a useful way — SQLite for dev, Postgres for prod is the default path, not an afterthought.
SeaORM as the ORM is a real cost: it's verbose, the active model pattern is awkward, and migrations are a separate CLI tool (sea-orm-cli) that you have to keep in sync with the framework — diesel or sqlx with sqlx-migrate would be simpler. The HTML/HTMX scaffold generates Tera templates, but there's no first-class story for a modern JS frontend; the 'client side rendering' starter punts to you to wire up Vite yourself. Background job reliability is thin — the Redis queue has no dead-letter queue, no retry visibility, no web UI; you're flying blind on failures in production. Documentation is decent for the happy path but drops off fast for anything non-standard, and the framework is young enough that breaking changes between minor versions have been a real friction point.