Hono: Routes, Context & Middleware

Hono is a small, fast web framework with an Express-like API, designed to run across multiple JavaScript runtimes -- Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Node.js, AWS Lambda -- without relying on Node-specific APIs.

Basic Routing

import { Hono } from 'hono'

const app = new Hono()

app.get('/users/:id', (c) => {
  const id = c.req.param('id')
  return c.json({ id, name: 'Ada' })
})

export default app

The Context Object

The context object (c) bundles request access (c.req), response helpers (c.json, c.text), and a way to pass data between middleware and handlers (c.set/c.get).

Middleware

app.use('/api/*', async (c, next) => {
  const token = c.req.header('Authorization')
  if (!token) return c.text('Unauthorized', 401)
  await next()
})

// Runs in registration order -- placing an auth check before
// a route handler ensures unauthenticated requests are rejected first

Web Standards, Not a Custom Model

Hono builds around the standard Request/Response Web API objects, rather than Node's http.IncomingMessage/ServerResponse model -- a core reason it runs consistently across many modern JS runtimes.