Building a Personal Site with Axum

Axum is a web framework built on top of Tokio and Tower, designed for building reliable and ergonomic web applications in Rust.

Why Axum?

Axum stands out among Rust web frameworks for several reasons:

• Type-safe extractors — request data is extracted and validated at compile time
• Tower middleware — reuse the entire Tower ecosystem
• Async-first — built on Tokio from the ground up

Template Rendering

For this site, I chose Askama as the template engine. It compiles templates at build time, catching errors before they reach production.

#[derive(Template)]
#[template(path = "home.html")]
struct HomeTemplate {
    title: String,
}

Styling with Tailwind

Tailwind CSS v4 makes it straightforward to build custom designs without writing much custom CSS. The utility-first approach pairs well with server-rendered HTML.

What's Next

In the next post, I'll cover the content engine that powers the blog — parsing markdown with frontmatter, processing includes, and calculating read times.