HTTP

NestRS’s HTTP layer is built on poem — listener, extractors, middleware. NestRS wraps it so a controller is a struct, routes come from #[routes], and the transport activates by importing HttpModule::for_root(...) in AppModule.imports — main never holds a transport.

Other HTTP-shaped surfaces — GraphQL, OpenAPI, MCP, WebSocket gateways — all mount on the same HttpTransport via HttpEndpointMeta, so a single binding (0.0.0.0:3002) serves them all. None of them runs its own port.

This category covers HTTP only — controllers, routes, response shaping, transport configuration. Authentication, authorization, and database queries each have their own category.

Install

cargo add nest-rs --features http

That is the whole manifest for a controller. The http feature carries the per-route guard chain, the pipe fold and the interceptor / filter / exception-filter sites that #[controller] and #[routes] expand to — none of which is a crate you name.

In this section

Basics

• Controllers & routes — #[controller], #[routes], path/query/JSON extractors, typed returns.
• Responses — Json<T>, status + body tuples, #[http_code], #[response_header], #[redirect].
• Errors — ResponseError on a feature error enum, RFC 9457 ProblemDetails for one-off problem responses.
• Extractors — the full extractor surface: RawBody, ClientIp, Scoped<T>, Ctx<T>, Reflector + #[meta(...)].

All options

• Configuration — HttpConfig, env vars vs pinned struct, TLS, CORS, the framework Server: header.
• Versioning — #[controller(version = "1")] and multi-version controllers.
• Compression — gzip/brotli negotiated from Accept-Encoding, behind one HttpConfig flag.
• Streaming responses — a chunked body or a Server-Sent Events stream returned from a handler.
• File uploads — a multipart/form-data part streamed straight into object storage.

Going further

• OpenAPI — a self-composing OpenAPI 3.1 document and Swagger UI, read off the routes above.
• Security — bind an AuthnGuard and an AbilityGuard to attach the principal and gate actions per row.
• GraphQL, WebSockets, MCP — each mounts on the same HttpTransport you configured here.