Rust integration

The Aspire Rust hosting integration enables you to run Rust applications alongside other resources in your AppHost project, providing service discovery, health checks, and observability for your Rust services.

⭐ Community Toolkit

Hosting integration

aspire add communitytoolkit-rust

The Aspire CLI is interactive, be sure to select the appropriate search result when prompted:

Select an integration to add:

> communitytoolkit-rust (CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Rust)
> Other results listed as selectable options...

#:package CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Rust@*

<PackageReference Include="CommunityToolkit.Aspire.Hosting.Rust" Version="*" />

Add Rust app

In your AppHost, call AddRustApp to register a Rust application as a resource. Provide the resource name and the path to the directory containing your Rust project (where Cargo.toml lives):

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var rustApp = builder.AddRustApp("rust-api", workingDirectory: "../rust-app")
    .WithHttpEndpoint(port: 8080, env: "PORT");

builder.AddProject<Projects.ExampleProject>("apiservice")
    .WithReference(rustApp);

builder.Build().Run();

The Aspire app host runs cargo run in the specified workingDirectory to start your Rust application. The required parameters are:

name — the resource name shown in the Aspire dashboard.
workingDirectory — path to the directory containing the Rust application.

Configure endpoints

Rust applications typically read a PORT environment variable to determine which port to listen on. Use WithHttpEndpoint to expose an HTTP endpoint and inject the port value as an environment variable:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var rustApp = builder.AddRustApp("rust-api", "../rust-app")
    .WithHttpEndpoint(port: 8080, env: "PORT");

builder.Build().Run();

Your Rust application can read the injected environment variable as follows:

use std::env;
use actix_web::{web, App, HttpServer, Responder};

async fn greet() -> impl Responder {
    "Hello from Rust!"
}

#[actix_web::main]
async fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let port = env::var("PORT").unwrap_or_else(|_| "8080".to_string());
    let addr = format!("0.0.0.0:{}", port);

    println!("Server listening on {}", addr);

    HttpServer::new(|| {
        App::new()
            .route("/", web::get().to(greet))
    })
    .bind(addr)?
    .run()
    .await
}

Custom arguments

To pass custom arguments to cargo run, chain the WithArgs method:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var rustApp = builder.AddRustApp("rust-api", "../rust-app")
    .WithArgs("--release")
    .WithHttpEndpoint(port: 8080, env: "PORT");

builder.Build().Run();