An efficient server implies a lower cost of the infrastructure, a better responsiveness under load and happy users.
How can you efficiently handle the resources of your server, knowing that you are serving the highest number of requests as possible, without sacrificing security validations and handy development?
Enter Fastify. Fastify is a web framework highly focused on providing the best developer experience with the least overhead and a powerful plugin architecture. It is inspired by Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town.
Install
Install with npm:
npm i fastify --save
Install with yarn:
yarn add fastify
Example
// Require the framework and instantiate it
const fastify = require('fastify')({
logger: true
})
// Declare a route
fastify.get('/', (request, reply) => {
reply.send({ hello: 'world' })
})
// Run the server!
fastify.listen(3000, (err, address) => {
if (err) throw err
fastify.log.info(`server listening on ${address}`)
})
with async-await:
const fastify = require('fastify')({
logger: true
})
fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
reply.type('application/json').code(200)
return { hello: 'world' }
})
fastify.listen(3000, (err, address) => {
if (err) throw err
fastify.log.info(`server listening on ${address}`)
})
Do you want to know more? Head to the Getting Started.
Quick start with Fastify CLI
Good tools make API development quicker and easier to maintain than doing everything manually.
The Fastify CLI is a command line interface tool that can create new projects, manage plugins, and perform a variety of development tasks testing and running the application.
The goal in this guide is to build and run a simple Fastify project, using the Fastify CLI, while adhering to the Style Guide recommendations that benefit every Fastify project.
Example
Open a terminal window.
npm install fastify-cli --global
Generate a new project and default app by running the following command:
fastify generate
For more information, see the Fastify CLI documentation.
Fastify v1.x
Code for Fastify's v1.x is in Branch 1.x, so all Fastify 1.x related changes should be based on branch 1.x.
Note
.listenbinds to the local host,localhost, interface by default (127.0.0.1or::1, depending on the operating system configuration). If you are running Fastify in a container (Docker, GCP, etc.), you may need to bind to0.0.0.0. Be careful when deciding to listen on all interfaces; it comes with inherent security risks.
See the documentation for more information.
Core features
- Highly performant: as far as we know, Fastify is one of the fastest web frameworks in town, depending on the code complexity we can serve up to 76+ thousand requests per second.
- Extendible: Fastify is fully extensible via its hooks, plugins and decorators.
- Schema based: even if it is not mandatory we recommend to use JSON Schema to validate your routes and serialize your outputs, internally Fastify compiles the schema in a highly performant function.
- Logging: logs are extremely important but are costly; we chose the best logger to almost remove this cost, Pino!
- Developer friendly: the framework is built to be very expressive and help the developer in their daily use, without sacrificing performance and security.
Benchmarks
Machine: EX41S-SSD, Intel Core i7, 4Ghz, 64GB RAM, 4C/8T, SSD.
Method:: autocannon -c 100 -d 40 -p 10 localhost:3000 * 2, taking the second average