Hono

Hono (Japanese for “Flame”) is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework built on Web Standards. It runs anywhere: Cloudflare Workers, Fastly, Deno, Bun, Node.js, and Vercel.

When to Use

• Edge Computing: Explicitly designed for Cloudflare Workers / Edge runtimes.
• Performance: Uses RegExpRouter, making it significantly faster than Express.
• Single File API: Perfect for small microservices or proxy servers.

Quick Start

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

app.get("/", (c) => c.text("Hello Hono!"));

app.get("/user/:name", (c) => {
  const name = c.req.param("name");
  return c.json({ message: `Hello ${name}!` });
});

export default app;

Core Concepts

Web Standards

Hono uses standard Request and Response objects. No proprietary API wrapper.

Middleware

Similar to Express but await next(). Batteries included: CORS, JWT, Basic Auth, Cache.

RPC (Hono RPC)

Share types between client and server for end-to-end type safety without GraphQL.

Best Practices (2025)

Do:

• Use Hono RPC: If you control both client and server, the typed client is amazing.
• Run on Bun: Hono + Bun is currently one of the fastest combinations for JS backends.

Don’t:

• Don’t use heavy Node.js dependencies: If targeting Cloudflare Workers, avoid packages that rely on fs or native Node modules.

References

• Hono Documentation