What is poem-api?

Poem-api is a starter template for building a backend server using Rust and the Poem framework. It gives you a ready-to-run foundation so you don't have to set up everything from scratch. The project comes with built-in support for API documentation via Swagger UI, JWT-based authentication, and environment variable configuration for things like port and host settings. At a high level, the server runs locally on your machine and exposes a Swagger UI interface at /docs where you can interact with your API endpoints directly from the browser. The template includes a login flow where you provide a username, receive a token in response, and then use that token to authorize access to protected endpoints. Those protected endpoints are marked with a lock icon in the Swagger interface, and you simply paste your token into a modal to unlock them. This would appeal to a developer who wants to build a Rust-based API quickly without dealing with the boilerplate of setting up authentication, documentation, and environment configuration. For example, if you're starting a new web project and want Rust's performance and safety guarantees, this template handles the foundational pieces so you can focus on writing your actual business logic. The README doesn't go into detail about what specific endpoints or features the server provides beyond the login flow, so you'd be working with a fairly bare-bones starting point. One practical detail worth noting is the development workflow. The project supports cargo-watch, which automatically recompiles and restarts the server whenever you make changes to the code. This is a quality-of-life feature that saves you from manually stopping and restarting the server during development. For production, the project includes a standard release build process that compiles an optimized executable you can run with production-specific environment variables.