What is fastify?
Fastify is a fast and low overhead web framework for Node.js. It is highly performant and provides an extensive plugin architecture, making it suitable for building a wide range of server-side applications and services.
What are fastify's main functionalities?
Web Server
Fastify allows you to create a web server that can handle HTTP requests and send responses. The above code demonstrates setting up a simple server that responds with JSON when the root route is accessed.
const fastify = require('fastify')({ logger: true });
fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
return { hello: 'world' };
});
fastify.listen(3000, (err, address) => {
if (err) throw err;
fastify.log.info(`server listening on ${address}`);
});
Route Shorthand Methods
Fastify provides shorthand methods for different HTTP methods like GET, POST, etc. This makes it easy to define routes for various request types.
fastify.get('/example', (request, reply) => {
reply.send({ message: 'This is a GET request' });
});
fastify.post('/example', (request, reply) => {
reply.send({ message: 'This is a POST request' });
});
Schema Validation
Fastify supports schema validation for request payloads, query strings, and parameters using JSON Schema. This ensures that the data received is in the expected format.
const schema = {
body: {
type: 'object',
required: ['name'],
properties: {
name: { type: 'string' },
age: { type: 'number' }
}
}
};
fastify.post('/user', { schema }, (request, reply) => {
// Handle request knowing that the body has been validated against the schema
});
Plugins
Fastify has a powerful plugin system that allows you to extend its core functionality. Plugins can add new features, routes, services, and decorators to the Fastify instance.
const myPlugin = async (fastify, options) => {
fastify.decorate('utility', () => {
return 'something useful';
});
};
fastify.register(myPlugin);
// Now you can use fastify.utility() in your application
Lifecycle Hooks
Fastify provides lifecycle hooks that can be used to execute code at various stages of the request/response cycle, such as onRequest, preHandler, onResponse, etc.
fastify.addHook('onRequest', (request, reply, done) => {
// Perform some operations before the request handler is executed
done();
});
Other packages similar to fastify
express
Express is one of the most popular web frameworks for Node.js. It is known for its simplicity and minimalism. Compared to Fastify, Express has a larger ecosystem and community but may not be as performant due to its less optimized architecture.
koa
Koa is a web framework designed by the creators of Express, aiming to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Koa uses async functions to eliminate callbacks and improve error handling. It is less opinionated than Fastify and has a smaller footprint.
hapi
Hapi is a rich framework for building applications and services, known for its powerful plugin system. It is designed to be more configurable and to provide a richer set of features out of the box compared to Fastify, which can make it heavier and potentially slower.
restify
Restify is a Node.js web service framework optimized for building semantically correct RESTful web services ready for production use at scale. Restify is similar to Fastify in terms of performance but is more focused on API creation than being a general-purpose web framework.
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 speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town.
Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.
Core features
- 100% asynchronous: all the core is implemented with asynchronous code, in this way not even a millisecond is wasted.
- 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 20000 request 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 you routes and serialize your outputs, internally Fastify compiles the schema in an highly performant function.
- Logging: logs are extremely important but are costly; we choose the best logger to almost remove this cost, Pino!
- Developer friendly: the framework is built to be very expressive and help the developer in his daily use, without sacrificing performances and security.
Benchmarks
- Hapi: 2200 req/sec
- Restify: 6133 req/sec
- Express: 8534 req/sec
- Koa: 9640 req/sec
- Fastify: 20256 req/sec
Documentation
Team
Matteo Collina
https://github.com/mcollina
https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina
https://twitter.com/matteocollina
Tomas Della Vedova
https://github.com/delvedor
https://www.npmjs.com/~delvedor
https://twitter.com/delvedor
Acknowledgements
This project is kindly sponsored by:
License
Licensed under MIT.