Building a Production API Gateway on Cloudflare Workers with Hono

Modern APIs need rate limiting, authentication, caching, and observability — but running a dedicated gateway server adds cost and complexity. Cloudflare Workers lets you build a full-featured API gateway at the edge, with zero cold starts and global distribution. In this guide, we'll build a production-ready API gateway using Hono (a lightweight web framework), Durable Objects (for distributed rate limiting), and Workers' built-in Cache API. Prerequisites Node.js 18+ and npm A Cloudflare account (free tier works) Basic familiarity with TypeScript and REST APIs Project Setup npm create cloudflare@latest api-gateway -- --template hono cd api-gateway npm install hono jose Your wrangler.toml needs Durable Object bindings: name = "api-gateway" main = "src/index.ts" compatibility_date = "2024-01-01" [durable_objects] bindings = [ { name = "RATE_LIMITER", class_name = "RateLimiter" } ] [[migrations]] tag = "v1" new_classes = ["RateLimiter"] [vars] UPSTREAM_URL = "https://api.example.com" RATE