FAB Structure

A FAB is a ZIP file with the given structure:

Any server-side components get compiled down to a single server-side file, server.js. All client-side assets are zipped into the _assets directory. Between these two, they represent an entire snapshot of a release.

server.js

A V8:Isolate-compatible single-file build of your server-side logic.

Exposes two entry points:

const getProdSettings = () => {
  return {
    // All production settings are bundled into the FAB here,
    // ensuring predictable behaviour regardless of host.
    // These are returned as a separate entry point, however,
    // so that any encrypted variables can be decrypted
    // by the host before being passed through to the render.
  }
}

const render = async (request, settings) => {
  // request: a fetch.Request object
  // settings: your production settings plus any
  //           environment-specific overrides

  const { body, statusCode, headers } = await myApp.render(request, settings)

  // return a fetch.Response object with the full data.
  // For streaming responses, see https://fab.dev/kb/streaming
  return new Response(body, { statusCode, headers })
}

module.exports = { render, getProdSettings }

_assets directory

Extracted from the FAB and hosted separately on a static file server like S3 at deploy time, then routed there by a CDN or load balancer using the URL path /_assets/*. This happens before your request even reaches your FAB, which means that the name "_assets" cannot be changed. More importantly, and assets are recommended to be served with cache-control: immutable headers. As such, files in this directory must be fingerprinted so they do not clash from release to release.

Since there can be no static assets outside the /_assets directory, and all assets must be fingerprinted, we provide @fab/compile which takes a more user-friendly format and generates a spec-compliant FAB.

fab.zip itself

FAB tooling uses deterministic-zip to create this file, which means that two FABs with identical contents will themselves be identical. See Production for more info.