Hono

Hono - [炎] means flame🔥 in Japanese - is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for the Edges. It works on any JavaScript runtime: Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Netlify, AWS Lambda, Lambda@Edge, and Node.js.

Fast, but not only fast.

import { Hono } from 'hono'
const app = new Hono()

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hono!'))

export default app

Quick Start

Just run this:

npm

npm create hono@latest

yarn

yarn create hono

pnpm

pnpm create hono

bun

bunx create-hono

deno

deno run -A npm:create-hono

Features

• Ultrafast 🚀 - The router RegExpRouter is really fast. Not using linear loops. Fast.
• Lightweight 🪶 - The hono/tiny preset is under 14kB. Hono has zero dependencies and uses only the Web Standard API.
• Multi-runtime 🌍 - Works on Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Deno, Bun, AWS Lambda, or Node.js. The same code runs on all platforms.
• Batteries Included 🔋 - Hono has built-in middleware, custom middleware, third-party middleware, and helpers. Batteries included.
• Delightful DX 😃 - Super clean APIs. First-class TypeScript support. Now, we've got "Types".

Use-cases

Hono is a simple web application framework similar to Express, without a frontend. But it runs on CDN Edges and allows you to construct larger applications when combined with middleware. Here are some examples of use-cases.

• Building Web APIs
• Proxy of backend servers
• Front of CDN
• Edge application
• Base server for a library
• Full-stack application

Who is using Hono?

Project	Platform	What for?
cdnjs	Cloudflare Workers	A free and open-source CDN service. Hono is used for the api server.
Cloudflare D1	Cloudflare Workers	Serverless SQL databases. Hono is used for the internal api server.
Unkey	Cloudflare Workers	An open-source API authentication and authorization. Hono is used for the api server.
OpenStatus	Bun	An open-source website & API monitoring platform. Hono is used for the api server.
Deno Benchmarks	Deno	A secure TypeScript runtime built on V8. Hono is used for benchmarking.
Deno Docs	Deno	An official Deno documentation site. Hono is used for the web server.

And the following.

• Drivly - Cloudflare Workers
• repeat.dev - Cloudflare Workers

Do you want to see more? See Who is using Hono in production?.

Hono in 1 minute

A demonstration to create an application for Cloudflare Workers with Hono.

Ultrafast

Hono is the fastest, compared to other routers for Cloudflare Workers.

Hono x 402,820 ops/sec ±4.78% (80 runs sampled)
itty-router x 212,598 ops/sec ±3.11% (87 runs sampled)
sunder x 297,036 ops/sec ±4.76% (77 runs sampled)
worktop x 197,345 ops/sec ±2.40% (88 runs sampled)
Fastest is Hono
✨  Done in 28.06s.

See more benchmarks.

Lightweight

Hono is so small. With the hono/tiny preset, its size is under 14KB when minified. There are many middleware and adapters, but they are bundled only when used. For context, the size of Express is 572KB.

$ npx wrangler dev --minify ./src/index.ts
 ⛅️ wrangler 2.20.0
--------------------
⬣ Listening at http://0.0.0.0:8787
- http://127.0.0.1:8787
- http://192.168.128.165:8787
Total Upload: 11.47 KiB / gzip: 4.34 KiB

Multiple routers

Hono has multiple routers.

RegExpRouter is the fastest router in the JavaScript world. It matches the route using a single large Regex created before dispatch. With SmartRouter, it supports all route patterns.

LinearRouter registers the routes very quickly, so it's suitable for an environment that initializes applications every time. PatternRouter simply adds and matches the pattern, making it small.

See more information about routes.

Web Standard

Thanks to the use of the Web Standard API, Hono works on a lot of platforms.

• Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare Pages
• Fastly Compute
• Deno
• Bun
• Vercel
• AWS Lambda
• Lambda@Edge
• Others

And by using a Node.js adaptor, Hono works on Node.js.

See more information about Web Standard.

Middleware & Helpers

Hono has many middleware and helpers. These makes "Write Less, do more" a reality.

Out of the box, Hono provides middleware and helpers for:

• Basic Authentication
• Bearer Authentication
• Body Limit
• Cache
• Compress
• Cookie
• CORS
• ETag
• html
• JSX
• JWT Authentication
• Logger
• Pretty JSON
• Secure Headers
• SSG
• Streaming
• GraphQL Server
• Firebase Authentication
• Sentry
• Others!

For example, adding ETag and request logging only takes a few lines of code with Hono:

import { Hono } from 'hono'
import { etag } from 'hono/etag'
import { logger } from 'hono/logger'

const app = new Hono()
app.use(etag(), logger())

See more information about Middleware.

Developer Experience

Hono provides a delightful "Developer Experience".

Easy access to Request/Response thanks to the Context object. Moreover, Hono is written in TypeScript. Hono has "Types".

For example, the path parameters will be literal types.

And, the Validator and Hono Client hc enable the RPC mode. In RPC mode, you can use your favorite validator such as Zod and easily share server-side API specs with the client and build type-safe applications.

See Hono Stacks.