Alex Spinov

Posted on Mar 30

Hono Has a Free Web Framework That Runs on Every Edge — Cloudflare, Vercel, Deno, Bun, AWS Lambda

#hono #typescript #serverless #webdev

The Edge Framework Problem

Express doesn't run on Cloudflare Workers. Fastify doesn't run on Deno Deploy. Each runtime needs its own framework.

Hono runs on every JavaScript runtime. Same code, 10+ deployment targets. Ultra-lightweight: 14KB.

What Hono Gives You

Simple, Express-Like API

import { Hono } from 'hono';

const app = new Hono();

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hello Hono!'));
app.get('/api/users/:id', (c) => {
  const id = c.req.param('id');
  return c.json({ id, name: 'John' });
});

export default app;

Middleware

import { cors } from 'hono/cors';
import { logger } from 'hono/logger';
import { bearerAuth } from 'hono/bearer-auth';
import { compress } from 'hono/compress';

app.use('*', logger());
app.use('*', cors());
app.use('/api/*', bearerAuth({ token: 'secret' }));
app.use('*', compress());

Validation (Zod Integration)

import { zValidator } from '@hono/zod-validator';
import { z } from 'zod';

app.post('/users',
  zValidator('json', z.object({
    name: z.string(),
    email: z.string().email(),
  })),
  (c) => {
    const body = c.req.valid('json'); // Fully typed
    return c.json({ created: true, user: body });
  }
);

JSX Templates

import { Hono } from 'hono';
import { html } from 'hono/html';

const Layout = ({ children }) => html`
  <html><body>${children}</body></html>
`;

app.get('/', (c) => {
  return c.html(
    <Layout>
      <h1>Welcome</h1>
    </Layout>
  );
});

RPC Client (Like tRPC)

// Server
const routes = app.get('/api/posts', (c) => c.json([{ id: 1, title: 'Hello' }]));
export type AppType = typeof routes;

// Client
import { hc } from 'hono/client';
import type { AppType } from './server';

const client = hc<AppType>('http://localhost:3000');
const posts = await client.api.posts.$get(); // Typed!

Performance

Hono on Bun: 300K+ requests/sec. On Cloudflare Workers: <1ms cold start.

Runs On

Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, Vercel, Deno, Bun, Node.js, Netlify, Fastly.

Quick Start

npm create hono@latest

Why This Matters

The edge is the future of web apps. Hono gives you a framework that works on every edge runtime — write once, deploy anywhere.

Building edge APIs that need data? Check out my web scraping actors on Apify Store — data at the edge. For custom solutions, email spinov001@gmail.com.

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