// the find
lukeed/polka
A micro web server so fast, it'll make you dance! :dancers:
Polka is a minimal Node.js HTTP server that wraps the native http module with routing and middleware. It's for people who want something close to Express but lighter — the whole core is about 90 lines. If you're building a small service or a tool that embeds a server, it's a reasonable choice.
The benchmarks are honest: Polka is genuinely close to raw Node performance, roughly 2-2.5x faster than Express in the numbers they show. Middleware compatibility with the Express ecosystem mostly just works since the signature is identical. The tiered middleware system (global → path-filtered → route) is actually cleaner than Express's sequential everything model. The monorepo ships useful companions — @polka/url, @polka/send — that are independently useful.
The project is effectively in maintenance mode: last meaningful activity was years ago, and the 2025 push date likely reflects a CI or dependency bump, not active development. No TypeScript types in the core package — you'll need @types/polka from DefinitelyTyped, which lags. No built-in body parsing, no response helpers (res.json, res.status), no cookie handling — you're assembling these from middleware on day one, which is fine until you're doing it for the tenth time. The regex-based route pattern exclusion (no /ab?cd, no named groups beyond basics) will surprise anyone coming from Express who used anything beyond simple named params.