Hono API Layer over PostgreSQL for Scholarly & Media Data
A media-monitoring / data-orchestration platform
Overview
A Hono-based API layer that serves scholarly-article and media data from PostgreSQL to the platform’s admin portal, consuming data populated by the upstream Airflow pipelines.
The Challenge
The dashboards and admin tooling need a fast, typed, read-oriented API over the data lake that the collection and enrichment pipelines populate, without dragging a heavy backend framework into the stack.
What We Built
A TypeScript service on Hono with a clean app/middleware/modules split. Domain modules cover scholar, broadcast, podchaser, truthsocial, newsletter, and health, each with Zod-validated request handling. Persistence uses the postgres client against Google Cloud SQL, with the Cloud SQL Proxy for local development and typed environment config via @t3-oss/env-core. Structured logging is handled by Pino (hono-pino), and the service is built with tsdown and containerized for Cloud Run, with Vitest tests in place.
Technologies & Approach
Hono for a minimal, fast, edge-friendly HTTP layer; Zod for input validation; postgres.js for direct SQL access; Pino for structured logs. The design deliberately favors a thin, well-typed read API over the pipeline-populated database.
Outcome / Impact
Bridges the data produced by the Airflow pipelines to the user-facing dashboard and admin portal through a lightweight, maintainable, schema-validated API.
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Lightweight typed API design with Hono + Zod
- Clean modular service structure by domain
- Direct PostgreSQL access against Cloud SQL
- Cloud Run-ready containerized deployment