What is Umbral?

Umbral is a batteries-included web framework for Rust. You declare your data and you get migrations, CRUD, an admin, and an optional REST API almost for free, with Rust's compile-time guarantees instead of runtime hope.

The name is the adjective 'of the shadow' (from Latin umbra, shadow).

Why Umbral exists

Web development in Rust is unassembled. Unlike Rails, there's no mainstream "just works" path. Every team picks and wires a web framework, a database layer, a migration tool, serialization, auth, and background jobs.

Two things suffer:

• Greenfield productivity. A basic CRUD/REST API takes days of plumbing before you write any real code.
• Porting. Moving an existing API to Rust means re-deriving the schema, the models, and the conventions by hand. There's no inspectdb, no managed migrations, no obvious on-ramp.

Umbral targets that on-ramp.

The shape

What you write

A model is a struct. A migration is generated. A handler reads ambient data. This is the target shape:

use umbral::prelude::*;
 
#[derive(Model)]
pub struct Post {
    pub id: i64,
    pub title: String,
    pub body: String,
    pub published: Option<DateTime<Utc>>,
}
 
async fn list_published() -> Result<Json<Vec<Post>>> {
    let posts = Post::objects()
        .filter(post::PUBLISHED.is_not_null())
        .order_by(post::PUBLISHED.desc())
        .limit(20)
        .fetch()
        .await?;
    Ok(Json(posts))
}

No State<DbPool> in the handler signature. No axum:: types. The ORM is ambient; the request body, params, and session are explicit arguments.

Status

Umbral is pre-alpha. There's no published crate yet. The architecture, the PRD, and the per-subsystem specs come first, and implementation follows milestone by milestone. As features land, each gets a doc page here.

For the long version, read the design specs in the repository root: arch.md (architecture), umbral-PRD.md (product requirements), and docs/specs/ (per-subsystem deep specs).

Roadmap

Notable items on the backlog. Pages land here as each one ships. See planning/features.md in the repository for the full punch-list.