How to use Native Fetch API in Node

For a long time, making requests on Node required a third-party library like Axios or node-fetch

However, now Node has the same fetch API found on browsers, meaning we can use the native fetch API to make requests.

In this article, we'll look at how to use the fetch API to make requests on Node.

Making a request

To make a request, we can use the fetch function, just like on browsers:

JAVASCRIPT
const request = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1");

const response = await request.json();

console.log(response);

We are making use of await/async to wait for the response to be returned, then we are parsing the response as JSON.

We can easily check the status of the request by checking the ok property:

JAVASCRIPT
const request = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1");

if (!request.ok) {
    // handle issue
}

Making a POST request is also very straight-forward, just pass in an options argument to the fetch function:

JAVASCRIPT
const options = {
    method: "POST",
    body: JSON.stringify({
        title: "foo",
        body: "bar",
        userId: 1,
    }),
    headers: {
        "Content-type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8",
    }
};

const request = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos", options);

const response = await request.json();

console.log(response);

Now, if you want to handle any exceptions, just wrap this inside of a try-catch:

JAVASCRIPT
try {
    const request = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1");

    if (!request.ok) {
        // handle issue
    }
} catch (error) {
    // handle error
}

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to use the native fetch API to make requests on Node.

We can now use this API and get rid of any third-party libraries that do essentially the same thing.

Thanks for reading!

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