The developer experience of Rails with the type safety and speed of Swift.
SwiftWeb is a HTTP web framework for Swift. It aims to replicate the rapid development and ergonomics of Ruby on Rails while being extremely performant and type safe. To achieve this, SwiftWeb leverages Swift's modern concurrency system to handle web requests with exceptional efficiency and safety.
-
Install SwiftWeb in your terminal if you haven't yet:
$ brew tap nikodittmar/swiftweb $ brew install swiftweb
-
In the terminal, create a new SwiftWeb application:
$ swiftweb new myapp
where "myapp" is the application name.
-
Change directory to
myappand start the web server:$ cd myapp $ swift run myapp server -
Go to
http://localhost:8080and you'll see the SwiftWeb welcome screen.
Similar to Rails, SwiftWeb includes everything needed to create performant databased-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.
To define a model, simply create a Swift struct that conforms to the Model protocol:
struct Book: Model {
static let schema: String = "books"
var id: Int?
var title: String
var author: String
}To migrate the model to the database, create a migration file. SwiftWeb will automatically generate the up and down methods.
struct CreateBooks: Migration {
static let name: String = "20250719121932_CreateBooks"
static func change(builder: SchemaBuilder) {
builder.createTable("books") { t in
t.column("title", type: "text")
t.column("author", type: "text")
}
}
}To run the migration, run the following command in your terminal:
$ swift run myapp db migrateSwiftWeb views are HTML with embedded Swift code:
<h1>Books</h1>
<ul>
<% for book in books { %>
<li><a href="/books/<%= book.id %>"><%= book.title %></a></li>
<% } %>
</ul>
<a href="/books/new">New Book</a>Controllers are a collection of handlers that are responsible for processing incoming HTTP requests and providing a suitable response.
struct BooksController {
func index(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
let books = try await Book.all(on: req.app.db)
return try .view("index", models: books, on: req)
}
func show(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
let id = try req.get(param: "id", as: Int.self)
let book = try await Book.find(id: id, on: req.app.db)
return try .view("show", with: book, on: req)
}
func new(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
return try .view("new", on: req)
}
func edit(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
let id = try req.get(param: "id", as: Int.self)
let book = try await Book.find(id: id, on: req.app.db)
return try .view("edit", with: book, on: req)
}
func create(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
var book = try req.get(Book.self, encoding: .form)
try await book.save(on: req.app.db)
let id = try book.getId()
return .redirect(to: "/books/\(id)")
}
func update(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
let id = try req.get(param: "id", as: Int.self)
let book = try req.get(Book.self, encoding: .form)
try await book.update(id: id, on: req.app.db)
return .redirect(to: "/books/\(id)")
}
func destroy(req: Request) async throws -> Response {
let id = try req.get(param: "id", as: Int.self)
try await Book.destroy(id: id, on: req.app.db)
return .redirect(to: "/books")
}
}To connect your controller actions to routes, simply register them in routes.swift.
func routes() -> Router {
let router = RouterBuilder()
router.get("/", to: HelloController().hello)
router.resources("/books", for: BooksController.self)
return router.build()
}Tested on 12 core Apple M2 Pro with 16 GB of memory using wrk.
$ wrk -t10 -c130 -d15s http://localhost:8080/hello
Running 15s test @ http://localhost:8080/hello
10 threads and 130 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 2.38ms 4.99ms 77.22ms 90.86%
Req/Sec 15.23k 1.99k 45.54k 87.56%
2277978 requests in 15.10s, 410.59MB read
Requests/sec: 150860.34
Transfer/sec: 27.19MB$ wrk -t1 -c1 -d15s http://localhost:8080/hello
Running 15s test @ http://localhost:8080/hello
1 threads and 1 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 36.09us 3.81us 498.00us 95.24%
Req/Sec 27.11k 801.51 30.13k 97.35%
407366 requests in 15.10s, 73.43MB read
Requests/sec: 26979.08
Transfer/sec: 4.86MB$ wrk -t10 -c130 -d15s http://localhost:8080/books/1
Running 15s test @ http://localhost:8080/books/1
10 threads and 130 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 1.49ms 2.34ms 39.84ms 91.13%
Req/Sec 14.18k 2.66k 63.11k 83.42%
2118630 requests in 15.10s, 456.63MB read
Requests/sec: 140310.21
Transfer/sec: 30.24MB$ wrk -t1 -c1 -d15s http://localhost:8080/books/1
Running 15s test @ http://localhost:8080/books/1
1 threads and 1 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 39.99us 3.85us 426.00us 94.64%
Req/Sec 24.52k 693.66 25.57k 96.69%
368416 requests in 15.10s, 79.40MB read
Requests/sec: 24398.46
Transfer/sec: 5.26MB| Database Fetch Single-Threaded Latency | Database Fetch Multi-Threaded Throughput |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Happy Path Single-Threaded Latency | Happy Path Multi-Threaded Throughput |
|---|---|
 |
 |
We welcome contributions of all kinds! Whether you're a seasoned developer or just getting started with Swift, we'd love to have your help.
If you find a bug, have a feature request, or would like to contribute code, please open an issue or submit a pull request.
SwiftWeb is open source and available under the MIT License. You can view the full license in the LICENSE.md file.