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I was thinking of getting some Skaven and arming them with 40K weapons, and I'm curious, are Ratmen still canon in 40K along with groups like Beastmen and Felinids? If so, is there any info about what they are like?

There are definitely Beastmen in 40K (again). They feature in the new Blackstone fortress game, but also as Tzaangors in Thousand Sons armies and Pestigors are part of Nurgle in background, but not in miniatures (yet).

Basically the Hrud are thought to be the equivalent of Skaven in 40K, but as far as I know they don't appear that often in the background.

There's a huge galaxy and whilst the Imperium has crushed many xeno under its boot; there's ample room on the fringe for ratmen to exist. You can certainly do it, the only limit is your budget, imagination and skill at converting.

The real key is what army you base your ratmen off. Guard would be a popular choice, though you could use any army as a "base" for the rules and then equip and style your army how you want. You could even base them off orks or Tyranids.

I'm not sure if they were ever "canon", although there were the odd hint. There's some concept art in The Gothic and the Eldritch for space skaven (which fed into the designs for the 4th edition WFB Skaven range, when the "steampunk" elements began to become a theme for that army), and in 1st edition needle rifles came equipped with specific toxins rather than working against everything; one of the options was a skaven-specific toxin. They were never mentioned by name in the Rogue Trader rulebook; I can't even remember if the writeup for beastmen mentioned rat as a type (although it wouldn't have prevented you using Skaven minis as beastmen, of course).

Hrud? The one in Xenobiology definitely wasn't a ratman, but other artwork might be, so who knows?

Early 40K was just Warhammer Fantasy in Space. GW already brought over humans, orks, elves, chaos and dwarves in the early days so the idea that skaven, undead and lizardmen would follow was pretty likely in those days.

However GW then started to branch out into new ideas and take 40K its own way. Squats were lost, ratmen became Tyranids; Necronds appeared as undead and far as I can tell lizardmen turned into fishmen (tau).

And those are only casual links, in general 40K went its own way after a while, heck Marines, besides being human, never had a fantasy equivalent until Stormcast Eternals came along.

When 40k came out, Slann ("lizardmen" used to be one of the slann slave races back then - the faction was redesigned in 5th edition WFB) were described as a major faction - they got the same sie wrte-up and miniatures range as Orks or Eldar.

you definitely have the scope to make them, although the ones I've seen previously have all been a bit lacklustre..SM with skaven heads stuck on or similar, so i think theyd need a bit of work, but with all the new necromunda and GS cult models you could probably make some cool 40k versions.

Thanks for all the info. Someone here mentioned Necromunda; I actually found some Skaven converted for Necromunda and Blood Bowl:

https://veteransergeant.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/40k-skaven-conversions/

While I do want to use Skaven as cultists, I was also thinking of converting them and Beastmen for an Astra Militarum unit, as around the Horus Heresy period, they were Imperial Guard. I could have some lore where the Imperium decides to do this again as an experiment.

Damn, I misread the thread title and thought this was about grimdark noodles...