Building a Rust GraphQL API

I've been moving deeper into backend engineering and decided to build my next API using Rust.

The stack is intentionally small:

• Rust
• Axum
• async-graphql
• PostgreSQL
• SQLx
• Docker

The goal isn't simply to make an API that works.

The goal is to understand what a production-oriented Rust service should look like.

Why Rust?

Rust gives me several things I care about when building backend systems:

• strong compile-time guarantees
• predictable performance
• explicit error handling
• excellent tooling
• a powerful type system

Coming from TypeScript, the biggest adjustment is thinking much more carefully about ownership, lifetimes and error boundaries.

Why GraphQL?

The project uses GraphQL as the API boundary.

That gives the frontend a strongly typed contract while allowing the server to evolve without creating a large collection of REST endpoints.

The basic request flow looks like this:

Browser
   |
   v
GraphQL
   |
   v
Resolver
   |
   v
Service
   |
   v
Repository
   |
   v
PostgreSQL