What is Kita?
Kita (/ˈkitə/) is a meta router for Fastify.
Just want to try it yourself?
Skip to the Quickstart or head over to our Migration Guide to migrate your existing project to Kita.
Kita is a tool that analyzes your TypeScript source code for functions named after an HTTP method (get, post, etc.) within the src/routes folder and automatically generates all the necessary configurations to register your routes in Fastify.
This includes reading the typing of the parameters and the return of the function to generate both the API documentation and the validation of input and output data.
Why use Kita?
Kita was created to facilitate the creation of APIs in TypeScript, allowing you to focus on what really matters: the code. With Kita, you don’t have to worry about input validation, output, documentation, routing, and so on.
Its philosophy is as follows:
Define once, use everywhere.
Normally, you define an interface for the body of your endpoint, then define a schema to validate it, then write documentation about the route, and then register the body parser in the route. Repeat the above for Query, Body, Params, Headers, Response, and Plugins, and before you know it, you have 10 different files for just a single HTTP endpoint.
With Kita, you do all this with just one exported function for each endpoint.
No more, no less.
Use Cases
Rapid Prototyping: Create an API quickly without worrying about documentation and input validation. With Kita, you create documented and consistent routes just by exporting functions.
Type Safety: All your routes will be typed and documented following OpenAPI standards, ensuring that the documentation never goes out of sync with the code. Using Kita, your code is the documentation.
Scalability: From small teams to extremely large teams, from small projects to projects with thousands of routes. Kita is scalable and flexible enough to adapt to any scenario.
End-to-End Security: With the OpenAPI specification available, you can use tools like Orval.dev or Swagger Codegen to generate clients for your API in over 50 different languages. APIs with Kita allow your frontend to consume the API in a simple, secure, and typed manner.
Speed: Using techniques of static analysis, Kita is capable of registering routes and generating functions at compile time, ensuring that your application runs less code at runtime. Kita uses all the features of Fastify to be extremely fast and efficient.
Developer Experience
Kita was created to be as simple as possible and not require configuration. Achieve excellence in API development with the least possible effort.
The point where it stands out the most is during the automatic generation of OpenAPI documentation:
By using code generators for the client (like Orval.dev or Swagger Codegen), when making a simple design change in the API, you can regenerate the client and ensure that the frontend is always in sync with the backend, highlighting all the lines of code that need to be changed.