_{🚡 tiny WebSocket middleware for Node.js}

tinyws is a WebSocket middleware for Node.js based on ws, inspired by koa-easy-ws.

Check the chat example out to get familiar with tinyws.

Features

• Small size (498B)
• Easy to use (only req.ws and nothing else)
• Framework-agnostic (works with tinyhttp, express etc)
• Written in TypeScript
• Pure ESM

Why not express-ws?

because express-ws is...

• Abandoned since 2018 💀
• Doesn't come with types out of the box (have to install @types/express-ws)
• Not compatible with tinyhttp and polka
• Buggy as hell
• Doesn't have tests

Install

pnpm i ws tinyws

Example

import { App, Request } from '@tinyhttp/app'
import { tinyws, TinyWSRequest } from 'tinyws'

const app = new App<Request & TinyWSRequest>()

app.use('/ws', async (req, res) => {
  if (req.ws) {
    const ws = await req.ws()

    return ws.send('hello there')
  } else {
    res.send('Hello from HTTP!')
  }
})

const server = app.listen(3000)
tinyws(app, server)

Restricting WebSocket to specific paths

You can restrict WebSocket handling to specific paths using the paths option:

// Single path
tinyws(app, server, { paths: '/ws' })

// Multiple paths
tinyws(app, server, { paths: ['/ws', '/socket'] })

See examples for express and polka integration.