🚧 This documentation is work in progress and for an unreleased version of Fresh.
Concepts
The way Fresh works is that it receives a
Request, passes it
through one or more middlewares until one of them responds. This can be an HTML
response, a JSON response or any other response for that matter.
If the response was HTML and contained Islands (=interactive Preact components), Fresh will boot them up in the browser and execute the relevant JavaScript.
Here is an overview of the basic concepts in Fresh:
- App - Holds all the information about your app, like routes, etc
- Middleware - Respond to a request and
return a
Response. Used to set headers, or pass state to other middelwares. When a middleware doesn’t call the next one and returns a response, it’s usually called a “handler”. - Context - Passed through every middleware. Use this to share state, trigger redirects or render HTML.
- Routes - Responds to a particular URL and runs as chain of middlewares if it matches
- Islands - Render interactive Preact components on the client
Advanced concepts:
- App wrapper - Responsible for the
outer HTML structure, usually up to the
<body>-tag - Layouts - Re-use a shared layout when
calling
ctx.render()across routes - Partials - Stream in server generated content on the current page