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Hono ​

Hono - means flame🔥 in Japanese - is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework built on Web Standards. 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.

ts

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

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

export default app

Quick Start ​

Just run this:

npmyarnpnpmbundeno

sh

npm create hono@latest

sh

yarn create hono

sh

pnpm create hono@latest

sh

bun create hono@latest

sh

deno init --npm hono@latest

Features ​

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.

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.

Cloudflare Workers KV

Cloudflare Workers

Serverless key-value database. Hono is used for the internal API server.

BaseAI

Local AI Server

Serverless AI agent pipes with memory. An open-source agentic AI framework for web. API server with Hono.

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.

Clerk

Cloudflare Workers

An open-source User Management Platform. Hono is used for the API server.

And the following.

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.

A gif showing a hono app being created quickly with fast iteration.

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.

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

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

See more information about Web Standards.

Middleware & Helpers ​

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

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

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

ts

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.

A screenshot showing Hono having proper literal typing when URL parameters. The URL "/entry/:date/:id" allows for request parameters to be "date" or "id"

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.