Fetch API has landed into Node.js

• node

  922 103,634 9.9 JavaScript

  Node.js JavaScript runtime ✨🐢🚀✨

  

node-fetch (which is great btw!) implements fetch "reasonably" as in stuff like `fetch('./foo').then(x => x.json())` works but it's very far from a "real" fetch.

Some people argued users would still like it and there was an attempt[1] by Myles but at the end of the day - the changes were pretty big.

For example: a response body in fetch is a web stream (a whole new stream type) and to cancel you use an AbortController (web type) which is an EventTarget (another web type). `node-fetch` uses Node streams instead which is very reasonable but not something a platform can "get away" with while still calling it fetch.

Here is a comment I wrote about it in the tracker during the PR review process https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/41749#issuecomment-10257...

[1](https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/27979)

• undici

  18 5,750 9.8 JavaScript

  An HTTP/1.1 client, written from scratch for Node.js

  

The commit adds undici (another Node.js project at https://github.com/nodejs/undici ) as a dependency and exposes its `fetch` - the code changes you see are probably just adding a flag :)

> I just wonder how come features like this that kind of seems obvious to include in the ecosystem takes quite some time to land?

I answered that below (check it out) but note how expensive adding a bad API is vs. asking people for one more `npm install` :) There is more discussion in https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/19393 and in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tn_-0S_FG_sla81wFohi8Sc8... a discussion from 2018 we had on it

• SurveyJS

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• fetch

  35 2,077 6.3 HTML

  Fetch Standard (by whatwg)

  

This is fetch: https://github.com/whatwg/fetch https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API

Here is discussion about it in Node with some (pretty old) discussion https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tn_-0S_FG_sla81wFohi8Sc8...

• deno

  448 92,907 9.9 Rust

  A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.

  

• request

  60 25,672 0.0 JavaScript

  🏊🏾 Simplified HTTP request client.

  

> It’s news, but is it big?

As someone who has been working almost exclusively on Node.js applications for years now, this is big.

Front-end developers have, for years, enjoyed this wrapper around the clunky XHR API. It is simple, intuitive, and it comes _free_ in the browser environment (and was easily shimmable before it was standard). Additionally, the depreciation of the popular request[0] a while ago, there has been a gap in The Right Way to do http requests without going into the low-level API that ‘http(s)’ provides. Fetch is promised-based (enabling seamless async/await) and, most importantly, standardized.

Basically, fetch provides a meaningful abstraction atop each platforms’ implementation of http-request-doing further unifying server-side and client-side patterns and idioms.

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/request

• clipanion

  6 1,046 5.5 TypeScript

  Type-safe CLI library / framework with no runtime dependencies

• llhttp

  7 1,588 8.7 TypeScript

  Port of http_parser to llparse

  

Those wasm blobs are Node's own llhttp https://github.com/nodejs/llhttp in wasm to speed up HTTP parsing.

The question is totally legitimate but please assume core doesn't make "load random binary" level kind of goofs :)

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• gists

  1 21 0.0 PowerShell

  A repo for Backblaze gists used in our FAQ (by Backblaze)

  

Good for NodeJS

However, I feel the fetch API is completely botched because it lacks timeout support. I have cobbled some together for https://github.com/Backblaze/gists/pull/8 but gosh. I really hope all that is actually not necessary :/

• got

  16 13,937 6.4 TypeScript

  🌐 Human-friendly and powerful HTTP request library for Node.js

Is there support for timeouts? It's the main reason I use https://github.com/sindresorhus/got

• set-cookie-parser

  1 167 4.5 JavaScript

  Parse HTTP set-cookie headers in JavaScript

https://github.com/nodejs/undici/blob/2dd3437e20c5a3cc466226...

I've argued with the authors of the fetch spec about this before, and ultimately settled on using https://www.npmjs.com/package/set-cookie-parser#user-content... to work around this flaw. (For clarity, I published the package, but chrusart wrote that method - https://github.com/nfriedly/set-cookie-parser/pull/19)

• create-react-app

  575 101,853 1.5 JavaScript

  Set up a modern web app by running one command.

  

> Does anyone who knows enough JavaScript point me in the right direction about it. I find all this very confusing.

There isn't a straight forward solution, but the closest for me is the combination of using a transpiler (Babel), and a bundler (Webpack).

A common criticism on node/javascript projects is the boiler plate setup required. As far as I know, there is no nice IDE that takes care of doing this part for you compared to other languages (I like to think it akin to starting a project from scratch with C++, gcc, and make).

Some larger projects, do have scripts that do a lot of boiler plate for you, such as Create-React-App. https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

Suggest a related project