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

npm i fastify --save

Example

// Require the framework and instantiate it
const fastify = require('fastify')()

// Declare a route
fastify.get('/', function (request, reply) {
  reply.send({ hello: 'world' })
})

// Run the server!
fastify.listen(3000, function (err) {
  if (err) throw err
  console.log(`server listening on ${fastify.server.address().port}`)
})

with async-await:

const fastify = require('fastify')()

fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
  reply.type('application/json').code(200)
  return { hello: 'world' }
})

fastify.listen(3000, function (err) {
  if (err) throw err
  console.log(`server listening on ${fastify.server.address().port}`)
})

Do you want to know more? Head to the Getting Started.

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 34000 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: Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz (4 cores, 8 threads), 16GiB RAM (Amazon EC2 m4.xlarge)

Method:: autocannon -c 100 -d 10 -p 10 localhost:3000 * 2, taking the second average

Framework	Version	Router?	Requests/sec
hapi	16.6.2	✓	5,768
Restify	5.2.0	✓	17,589
Express	4.16.1	✓	20,860
total.js	2.8.0	✓	22,201
Koa (koa-router)	2.3.0 (koa-router@7.2.1)	✓	23,093
Koa	2.3.0	✗	25,571
take-five	1.3.4	✓	28,255
micro (micro-router)	9.0.0 (micro-router@2.2.3 )	✓	28,700
connect (router)	3.6.5 (router@1.3.2)	✓	33,753
Fastify	0.29.2	✓	34,613
micro	9.0.0	✗	36,522
connect	3.6.5	✗	37,810
-
http.Server	8.6.0	✗	39,952

Benchmarks taken using https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks. This is a synthetic, "hello world" benchmark that aims to evaluate the framework overhead. The overhead that each framework has on your application depends on your application, you should always benchmark if performance matters to you.

The relative overhead of micro, connect and fastify is too small to measure, and they perform very closely on this benchmarks.

Documentation

• Getting Started
• Server Methods
• Routes
• Logging
• Middlewares
• Hooks
• Decorators
• Validation and Serialization
• Lifecycle
• Reply
• Request
• Content Type Parser
• Plugins
• Testing
• Plugins Guide
• HTTP2

Ecosystem

• Core - Core plugins maintained by the Fastify team.
• Community - Community supported plugins.

Team

Fastify is the result of the work of a great community. Team members are listed in alphabetical order.

Lead Maintainers

• Matteo Collina, https://twitter.com/matteocollina, https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina
• Tomas Della Vedova, https://twitter.com/delvedor, https://www.npmjs.com/~delvedor

Collaborators

• Dustin Deus, https://twitter.com/dustindeus, https://www.npmjs.com/~starptech
• Evan Shortiss, https://twitter.com/evanshortiss, https://www.npmjs.com/~evanshortiss
• James Sumners, https://twitter.com/jsumners79, https://www.npmjs.com/~jsumners
• Luciano Mammino, https://twitter.com/loige, https://www.npmjs.com/~lmammino
• Tommaso Allevi, https://twitter.com/allevitommaso, https://www.npmjs.com/~allevo
• Çağatay Çalı, https://twitter.com/cagataycali, https://www.npmjs.com/~cagataycali

Acknowledgements

This project is kindly sponsored by:

• nearForm
• LetzDoIt

License

Licensed under MIT.