Installation

Rust Toolchain

Volter requires Rust 1.79 or later. Check your version:

rustc --version

To install or update Rust, use rustup:

rustup update stable

Add Volter to Your Project

Create a new Rust project:

cargo new my-app
cd my-app

Add Volter as a dependency:

cargo add volter
cargo add tokio --features full

This adds the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
volter = "0.1.0"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

You only need tokio for the async runtime and TcpListener. Volter re-exports everything else (http, tower, etc.) through the volter crate.

Verify Installation

Replace src/main.rs with:

use tokio::net::TcpListener;
use volter::{get, serve, Router};

async fn hello() -> &'static str {
    "Hello, World!"
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), volter::BoxError> {
    let app = Router::new().route("/", get(hello));
    let listener = TcpListener::bind("0.0.0.0:3000").await?;
    eprintln!("Listening on http://0.0.0.0:3000");
    serve(listener, app).await
}

Run the project:

cargo run

Visit http://localhost:3000 — you should see Hello, World!.

Optional Features

Volter has two optional feature flags:

Enable WebSocket support:

cargo add volter --features ws

To disable macros (not recommended unless you have a dependency conflict):

cargo add volter --no-default-features

Using the CLI

Volter includes a scaffolding CLI:

cargo install volter-cli
volter new my-api
cd my-api
cargo run

See the CLI chapter for details.