Hono

Hono is a small, fast web framework built on Web Standards, running across many JavaScript runtimes, on Clever Cloud.

Hono supports many runtimes, including Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Netlify, AWS Lambda, and Node.js. Clever Cloud runs Hono applications on the Node.js runtime through the @hono/node-server adapter.

To follow this guide with a fresh project, scaffold a new Hono application using the official CLI (you’ll need Node.js). Pass -t nodejs to select the Node.js template directly, since the interactive picker lists 13 runtimes and does not display them all at once:

npm create hono@latest myHonoApp -- -t nodejs
cd myHonoApp

Answer “yes” when prompted to install dependencies.

Deploy a Node.js application

To deploy your Hono project to Clever Cloud, adapt its entry point, then create and configure the application.

Adapt the entry point

The nodejs template’s src/index.ts starts a server on port 3000 and has no shutdown handling. Both need adjusting before deploying to Clever Cloud.

Clever Cloud automatically injects a PORT environment variable set to 8080, and requires every application to listen on 0.0.0.0:8080. Read process.env.PORT instead of the hardcoded port, with a fallback for local development. Clever Cloud also terminates the previous instance during a restart or a redeploy with zero-downtime deployment enabled, so keep a reference to the returned server and close it on SIGINT/SIGTERM to let in-flight requests finish before the process exits:

// src/index.ts
import { serve } from '@hono/node-server'
import { Hono } from 'hono'

const app = new Hono()

app.get('/', (c) => {
  return c.text('Hello Hono!')
})

const server = serve({
  fetch: app.fetch,
  port: Number(process.env.PORT) || 3000
}, (info) => {
  console.log(`Server is running on http://localhost:${info.port}`)
})

process.on('SIGINT', () => {
  server.close()
  process.exit(0)
})
process.on('SIGTERM', () => {
  server.close((err) => {
    if (err) {
      console.error(err)
      process.exit(1)
    }
    process.exit(0)
  })
})

The generated package.json defines three scripts: dev runs the server with live reload, build compiles TypeScript to dist/ with tsc, and start runs the compiled output with node dist/index.js.

Create a Node.js application

Install Clever Tools and create a Node.js application linked to your project folder:

npm i -g clever-tools
clever login

cd myHonoApp
clever create -t node

# Or link an existing Clever Cloud application:
clever link your_app_name_or_ID

Environment variables

Configure instance sizing, then set the build hook. A medium build instance (M) provides enough memory to compile the project; an XS instance is sufficient to run the server:

clever scale --build-flavor M
clever scale --flavor XS

clever env set CC_NODE_DEV_DEPENDENCIES install
clever env set CC_POST_BUILD_HOOK "npm run build"

By default, Clever Cloud only installs production dependencies, so typescript would be missing when tsc runs. CC_NODE_DEV_DEPENDENCIES tells it to install development dependencies too, and CC_POST_BUILD_HOOK runs the build script once they’re installed, which produces dist/ for start to run automatically afterwards. No PORT variable needs to be set: Clever Cloud injects it automatically, and the application already reads it from process.env.PORT.

Push your code

Once you complete these steps, commit your project and deploy it:

git add .
git commit -m "First deploy"
clever deploy  # or: git push clever main:master (find the git URL in your app's Information tab)
clever open

You can display your application’s URL or add a custom domain (DNS configuration required):

clever domain
clever domain add your.website.tld

Learn more