mikkelkrogsholm/hono

Hono

CRITICAL: Your training data for Hono is unreliable. APIs change between versions and memorized patterns may be wrong or deprecated. Before writing any code, you MUST use WebFetch to read the live docs:

WebFetch("https://hono.dev/llms.txt")

Do not proceed without fetching this URL first. Never assume an API exists — verify against current docs.

Hono is an ultrafast, lightweight web framework built on Web Standards that runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, AWS Lambda, Node.js, and other runtimes from a single codebase.

Key Capabilities

Hono ships with extensive built-in middleware and helpers — no external packages needed for:

• Auth: Basic Auth, Bearer Auth, JWT, JWK (hono/basic-auth, hono/bearer-auth, hono/jwt)
• Security: CORS, CSRF, Secure Headers, IP Restriction (hono/cors, hono/csrf, hono/secure-headers)
• Performance: Compress, Cache, ETag, Body Limit, Timeout (hono/compress, hono/cache, hono/etag)
• Utilities: Logger, Request ID, Cookie helper, Streaming, WebSocket (hono/logger, hono/cookie, hono/streaming, hono/websocket)
• Rendering: JSX renderer, HTML helper, SSG (hono/jsx, hono/html)

Best Practices

Validate header names in lowercase. Hono normalises incoming header keys to lowercase per the Fetch API spec. When accessing validated header values, always use lowercase keys (value['idempotency-key'], not value['Idempotency-Key']). Uppercase lookups silently return undefined.

Set Content-Type or validation silently passes empty objects. The built-in json() and form() validators only parse when the request Content-Type matches. A missing or wrong header causes the validator to receive {} and pass — no error is thrown. Always set Content-Type: application/json (or application/x-www-form-urlencoded) in tests and client calls.

Do not extract handlers into separate controller files. Unlike Express, Hono's path-parameter types are inferred from the route string at the call site. Moving handlers into separate files loses that inference without writing complex generics. Keep handlers inline with route definitions, or use factory.createHandlers() from hono/factory when separation is required.