Rustman

A free, open-source, native API testing desktop app — built entirely in Rust with iced.

No subscriptions. No cloud sync. No telemetry. No webview. Your requests stay on your machine.

Download · Website

Core Philosophy

Rustman is, and will always be, completely free and open source.

• No paid plans. No premium tier. No "Pro" version. No subscriptions. Ever.
• No account required to use any feature.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no phoning home.
• Collections, history, and environments stay on your machine — always.

This is not a business. It is a tool built for developers, by a developer, and given to the community for free. That will never change.

Why Rustman?

Features

• Pure native GUI — built with iced, zero webview, zero Electron, zero JavaScript runtime
• Native Rust HTTP engine — requests go through reqwest, no browser CORS limits or response size caps
• WebSocket — full-duplex connections with a live message feed, send/receive in real time
• JSON response viewer — syntax-highlighted, pretty-printed, with full text selection across the whole body
• Collections & history — organize requests, replay from history, stored in local SQLite + Git VCS
• Git-based collection versioning — every collection save is a real git commit; git log works in your data directory
• Environment variables — {{variable}} substitution in URLs, headers, and bodies
• All auth types — Bearer, Basic, API Key (header or query), Cookie, JWT
• cURL import & export — paste any cURL command; parsed by a native Rust tokenizer
• Postman collection import — import existing v2.1 collections and environments
• OpenAPI import — import any OpenAPI 3.x spec and generate requests automatically
• Pre/post-request scripts — (planned: rquickjs JavaScript sandbox)
• Multiple request tabs — work on several requests at the same time
• Session persistence — open tabs are restored on next launch

Download

Grab the latest binary from the releases page.

Build from source

Requirements: Rust toolchain (stable) and a few system libraries (see below).

git clone https://github.com/animeshchaudhri/rustman
cd rustman
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/rustman.

Linux system dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y \
  libxkbcommon-dev libxi-dev libx11-dev \
  libxcb1-dev libxcb-xkb-dev libdbus-1-dev \
  pkg-config cmake build-essential

macOS and Windows have no extra requirements beyond the Rust toolchain.

Development

cargo run

Tech stack

• GUI — iced 0.13 (pure Rust, wgpu-rendered)
• HTTP — reqwest 0.12 with rustls
• WebSocket — tokio-tungstenite
• Storage — rusqlite (SQLite, bundled)
• Collection VCS — git2 (libgit2)
• Scripting — rquickjs (QuickJS JavaScript engine, planned)
• Syntax highlighting — tree-sitter (JSON, JavaScript)

License

MIT — see LICENSE