Building Production Apps with Deno Fresh 2

Author here. I built a single Fresh 1 app 18 months ago but moved on due to lack of HMR. So I decided to give Fresh 2 a serious try after the beta announcement in September.

Since then I've: migrated my personal site from ~10 years of Jekyll, built a story authoring platform, a URL shortener, and a service provisioning app.

The HMR works, minimal config is real, and using Deno's built-in tooling (fmt, lint, check, test) instead of fighting with build configs has been refreshing.

But: ecosystem is young, docs are thin on advanced topics, and the dev server sometimes runs into crashes (I submitted a PR to fix it but it hasn't landed yet).

I've been deploying to the new Deno Deploy, which my thoughts on are a bit more complicated. Lots of pros and lots of cons. Last week was particularly rocky in terms of stability.

I use Next.js + Node.js + Tailwind at my day job, as well as maintain a legacy Rails app. So I've got a pretty got direct comparison to ergonomics and productivity. It's very very nice to not have to deal with things like Biome or Eslint + Prettier. I'm quite interested in exploring what Fresh 2 + Deno could look like for some apps at work, as Fresh 2 seems stable enough to use beyond just hobby projects.

Overall though, if you want a fast and simple dev experience for content-heavy sites or small-to-medium web apps, Fresh 2 is mature enough to ship with and genuinely enjoyable to work with. I am curious to see how it feels for larger apps too as I keep building with it.

Happy to answer questions about the migration process or building with Fresh 2 in general.