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Introduction

Kilat is a full-stack edge starter that runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers. The Indonesian word for lightning — and the name is the promise: code that runs fast, deploys fast, and is understood fast. No Docker, no VPS, no reverse proxy. wrangler deploy and you’re live on 300+ edge locations.

Free to start. 100K requests/day, 500 MB D1 database, 20K static assets — all on Cloudflare’s free tier. No credit card, no server to rent, no database to provision. See the full free tier limits.

Outgrew the free tier? Dulak is Kilat’s sister project — same stack, same templates, but runs on Bun + bun:sqlite with zero platform limits. Deploy with a single docker compose up on any free-tier VPS (Oracle Cloud, Fly.io, Railway). No request caps, no CPU time ceilings, no database size limits. See the migration guide — there’s even a copy-paste prompt for your AI agent to do it automatically.

The stack

Section titled “The stack”
Layer Choice Why
Runtime Cloudflare Workers Serverless at the edge; 300+ locations
HTTP Hono 4.x Runtime-agnostic, app.fetch(request, env)
Database D1 (SQLite at the edge) Async, zero-ORM, raw prepared statements
UI Inertia v3 + React 19 Server-driven UI with in-process SSR
Build esbuild Client bundle + content-hashed assets
Deploy Wrangler wrangler deploy — that’s it
Password hashing PBKDF2 via Web Crypto 100K iterations (Workers cap)
Package manager Bun >= 1.3 (recommended) or npm Install + scripts only (not the runtime)

Bun is the recommended package manager and script runner — the app does NOT run on Bun. It runs on the Workers runtime via Wrangler/Miniflare. npm install works for installing deps, but bun:test and build scripts require Bun. Install Bun.

What’s included

Section titled “What’s included”

Kilat ships production-grade guardrails from day one — not a scaffold you have to harden, a skeleton that already works:

  • Auth: register, login, logout — PBKDF2 passwords, DB-backed sessions (httpOnly cookies, 30-day expiry, Secure in production), CSRF (Origin check).
  • Forgot / reset password with email delivery and hashed reset tokens (60-minute expiry).
  • Google OAuth register-or-login (zero-dependency, plain fetch).
  • Roles: user / admin, requireRole('admin') guard, /admin page with paginated user list.
  • Inertia v3: full SSR on first load, SPA navigation after, asset-version negotiation (409 + reload), partial reloads, flash messages, shared props.
  • Migrations: versioned SQL files applied via wrangler d1 migrations apply.
  • Ops: per-request logging with correlation ID, security headers (CSP, nosniff, frame denial), /health check, HSTS.
  • Testing: bun test — boots the Hono app and drives it through app.request().

What’s missing is your business logic — and that’s the point.

Quick start

Section titled “Quick start”
Terminal window
npm create kilat@latest my-app

Have Bun? bun create kilat@latest my-app is faster — Bun installs deps in seconds and runs the test suite and build scripts.

The interactive prompt lets you pick a framework (React 19, Svelte 5, Vue 3) and a styling approach (vanilla CSS or Tailwind CSS v4) via arrow-key navigation. It downloads the template, patches wrangler.toml, renames package.json, and runs bun install for you.

Terminal window
cd my-app
bun run db:migrate    # create local D1 schema
bun run build         # build client assets + SSR bundle
bun run dev           # http://localhost:8787

Templates

Section titled “Templates”

Six template variants — pick one via the scaffolder:

Template Stack Branch
default React 19 + vanilla CSS main
react-tailwind React 19 + Tailwind CSS v4 template/react-tailwind
svelte-vanilla Svelte 5 + scoped <style> CSS template/svelte-vanilla
svelte-tailwind Svelte 5 + Tailwind CSS v4 template/svelte-tailwind
vue-vanilla Vue 3 + scoped <style> CSS template/vue-vanilla
vue-tailwind Vue 3 + Tailwind CSS v4 template/vue-tailwind

Skip the prompts:

Terminal window
npm create kilat my-app --template svelte-tailwind
npm create kilat .                  # use current dir
npm create kilat my-app --no-install

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”