Documentation

Asena is an IoC web framework for Bun: decorate a class, and the container finds it, wires its dependencies and serves its routes. Start with the first section, or jump to what you need.

Start

5 minutes

Get Started

Install the CLI, create a project and serve your first route.

Overview

Key Concepts

The container, field injection, scopes, bootstrap, adapters and context.

Structure

Best Practices

Feature folders, thin controllers, repository ownership and the silent traps.

Reference

Examples

Complete, runnable example projects.

Concepts

HTTP

Controllers

Routes, parameters and responses.

IoC

Dependency Injection

@Inject, @Strategy, @Value and scopes.

Lifecycle

Component Lifecycle

@OnStart, @OnStop, shutdown and health probes.

Requests

Middleware

Global, controller and route middleware, CORS and rate limiting.

Type Safety

Validation

Route context contracts and validator classes.

Real-time

WebSocket

Namespaces, rooms and multi-pod broadcasting.

Messaging

Microservices

Request/response and events over a broker.

In-process

Event System

Decoupled reactions inside one application.

Background

Scheduled Tasks

Cron jobs as components.

Per request

Context

Reading the request, writing the response, sharing state.

See the sidebar for the rest: static files, Ulak, frontend controllers, post-processors and inheritance.

Migrate

NestJS

Coming from NestJS

Modules, guards, pipes, filters and tests mapped to Asena side by side.

Adapters

Architecture

Adapters Overview

How the core and the HTTP layer fit together, and which to pick.

Native Bun

Ergenecore

Zero runtime dependencies, Bun's own router.

Hono

Hono Adapter

The Hono middleware ecosystem behind the same decorators.

Packages

Database

Drizzle ORM

Repositories and declarative transactions.

API Docs

OpenAPI

An OpenAPI 3.1 spec generated from your routes.

Observability

OpenTelemetry

Traces and metrics for every request.

Caching and Transport

Redis

Cache decorators, WebSocket and microservice transports.

Streaming

Kafka

A Kafka client and microservice transport.

Logging

Logger

The official logger.

Testing

Start here

Testing Overview

Which tool to use at which level.

Unit

mockComponent

One class, every dependency mocked automatically.

Web layer

createWebTest

Real controllers and validation, mocked services.

Full app

createTestApp

The whole container behind a real HTTP server.

AI

Teach your coding agent Asena. The skill works with Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf and any other tool that supports Agent Skills:

npx skills add asenajs/skills

Every docs page also has buttons to copy it as Markdown or open it in Claude or ChatGPT, and the whole site is published for language models:

Index

llms.txt

Every page with a one-line description and a link to its Markdown.

Full text

llms-full.txt

The complete documentation in a single file.