Build a Lightning-Fast API with Fastify

Unlock the Power of Fastify: A High-Performance Framework for Backend Web Development

Fastify is a cutting-edge framework for building high-performance backend web applications with minimal overhead. Inspired by Hapi and Express, Fastify has emerged as one of the fastest web frameworks running on Node.js. With the latest version, Fastify 3.0, developers can unlock new functionalities, including running Express applications inside Fastify, enhanced logging serialization, and improved TypeScript support.

Key Features of Fastify

Fastify boasts an impressive array of features that make it an attractive choice for developers:

• High Performance: Fastify can serve up to 30,000 requests per second or more, depending on code complexity.
• Extendibility: Hooks, plugins, and decorators make it fully extensible.
• Scheme-based: Internally, Fastify compiles a JSON schema to a highly performant function for route validation and output serialization.
• Logging: Pino, a highly cost-effective logger, is used for faster logging.
• Developer-friendly Environment: The framework is expressive and easy to get started with, allowing developers to quickly scale small projects to larger performant applications without sacrificing performance or security.
• TypeScript-ready: The TypeScript type declaration file maintains support for the TypeScript community.

5 Essential Fastify Plugins You Should Know

Fastify’s strong plugin architecture enables developers to build plugins that work seamlessly with Fastify to create quick building blocks for bootstrapping API projects. Here are five important Fastify plugins to note:

• fastify-auth: An authentication plugin developed by the Fastify team that allows you to quickly inject authentication logic into your API routes.
• fastify-cors: Cross-origin requests are essential for any application, and fastify-cors helps you manage this without the need for installing a CORS package separately.
• fastify-jwt: This plugin decorates your application with standard JSON web tokens, internally using the jsonwebtoken package.
• fastify-nextjs: Next is a React framework for building pre-rendering websites at the server-side. This plugin helps you do the same with Fastify.
• fastify-redis: This enables your Fastify application to share the same Redis connection throughout the server.

Fastify vs Koa vs Express: A Comparison

Each framework has its pros and cons, but each also has its application. When choosing a framework, consider the following evaluation criteria:

• Speed: Fastify received the best benchmark results with 78,956 requests/sec, followed by Koa with 54,848 requests/sec, and Express with 15,978 requests/sec.
• Plugins Ecosystem: Fastify has a wide range of plugins, making it a one-stop solution for developers.
• TypeScript Support: Fastify is the only framework that has TypeScript support out of the box.

Creating Your First Server with Fastify 3.0

Get started with building your first server with Fastify 3.0 by following these steps:

1. Installation and Requirements: Install the latest Node.js version and create a new npm project.
2. Create server.js: Create a new file called server.js and add the necessary code to start the server.
3. Add Routes to Your API: Add simple CRUD routes to your application.
4. Add a Plugin to Your Fastify API: Install fastify-routes and register the plugin to retrieve a map of all registered routes with your Fastify instance.
5. Add Data Validation: Add basic data validation to your routes using Fastify’s built-in validation schemas.

Get Started with Fastify Today!

With its impressive performance, extendibility, and developer-friendly environment, Fastify is an excellent choice for building high-performance backend web applications. Explore the world of Fastify and unlock its full potential to take your development skills to the next level.