Run on Node
Run a Base worker as a plain Node process, with the same app model on a different platform.
Base's app model (settings, modules, services, decorators, DI) is platform-neutral. A platform delegate adapts it to what's underneath: Cloudflare's workerd by default, or Node. This isn't a novelty; it's how Base's own test suite runs, and how containers execute your worker inside Docker.
Run it
Instead of wrangler dev, the CLI spawns a Node process running a launcher that loads your settings.ts and starts an HTTP server on your configured port. Same routes, same services:
Your @HttpService classes, GraphQL resolvers, RPC procedures, validation, DI, middleware: all identical. Nothing in your service code knows which platform it's on.
What changes: the bindings
What does not come along are Cloudflare's platform resources. On Node there is no D1, KV, R2, Durable Object, or Queue binding, since those are workerd concepts. Concretely: a D1-backed database has no Node equivalent, so a worker that must run on both platforms picks its database per environment.
The ORM has first-class answers: the better-sqlite driver (a local SQLite file, the natural Node counterpart to D1) and the planetscale driver (hosted MySQL, works from anywhere). Both are ordinary named database configurations; your entities and repositories don't change.
The rule of thumb: code above the bindings is portable; the bindings themselves are per-platform configuration. Settings were designed to hold exactly that difference; see Environments and Configuration.
When you'll use it
- Tests: integration tests target a live worker over HTTP; unit tests and the framework's own suite run everything on Node with zero Cloudflare in the loop.
- Containers: the container story is this pattern in production, with your worker bundled alongside a Node bootstrap, running
node ./bootstrap.js ...inside Docker. If your worker runs on Node, it runs in a container. - Debugging: the scaffold's "Run: Current Worker (Node)" VS Code configuration launches the worker under the debugger as a plain Node process (Debugging), often the fastest way to step through boot-time behavior.
BaseWorker.create(settings) describes an application, not a Cloudflare Worker; the platform delegate decides what that description runs on. Write services against Base's abstractions (repositories, stores, queues, context) rather than raw platform APIs, and portability is the default.