What Is Fastify?

Nowadays, building a solid application is just not enough, and the time it takes to get an application to market has become one of the major constraints a development team must deal with. For this reason, Node.js is the most used runtime environment currently adopted by companies. Node.js has proved how easy and flexible it is to build web applications. To compete in this tech scene that moves at the speed of light, you need to be supported by the right tools and frameworks to help you implement solid, secure, and fast applications. The pace is not only about the software performance, but it is also important to take the time to add new features and to keep the software reliable and extensible. Fastify gives you a handy development experience without sacrificing performance, security, and source readability. With this book, you will get all the knowledge to use this framework in the most profitable way.

This chapter will explain what Fastify is, why it was created, and how it can speed up the development process. You will become confident with the basic syntax to start your application, add your first endpoints, and learn how to configure your server to overview all the essential options.

You will start to explore all the features this framework offers, and you will get your hands dirty as soon as possible. There is a first basic example that we will implement to explain the peculiarities of the framework. We will analyze the environment configuration and how to shut down the application properly.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is Fastify?
• Starting your server
• Adding basic routes
• Adding a basic plugin instance
• Understanding configuration types
• Shutting down the application