A light-weight module that brings Fetch API to Node.js.
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You might be looking for the v2 docs
- Motivation
- Features
- Difference from client-side fetch
- Installation
- Loading and configuring the module
- Upgrading
- Common Usage
- Advanced Usage
- API
- TypeScript
- Acknowledgement
- Team - Former
- License
Motivation
Instead of implementing XMLHttpRequest
in Node.js to run browser-specific Fetch polyfill, why not go from native http
to fetch
API directly? Hence, node-fetch
, minimal code for a window.fetch
compatible API on Node.js runtime.
See Jason Miller's isomorphic-unfetch or Leonardo Quixada's cross-fetch for isomorphic usage (exports node-fetch
for server-side, whatwg-fetch
for client-side).
Features
- Stay consistent with
window.fetch
API. - Make conscious trade-off when following WHATWG fetch spec and stream spec implementation details, document known differences.
- Use native promise and async functions.
- Use native Node streams for body, on both request and response.
- Decode content encoding (gzip/deflate/brotli) properly, and convert string output (such as
res.text()
andres.json()
) to UTF-8 automatically. - Useful extensions such as redirect limit, response size limit, explicit errors for troubleshooting.
Difference from client-side fetch
- See known differences:
- If you happen to use a missing feature that
window.fetch
offers, feel free to open an issue. - Pull requests are welcomed too!
Installation
Current stable release (3.x
) requires at least Node.js 12.20.0.
npm install node-fetch
Loading and configuring the module
ES Modules (ESM)
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
CommonJS
node-fetch
from v3 is an ESM-only module - you are not able to import it with require()
.
If you cannot switch to ESM, please use v2 which remains compatible with CommonJS. Critical bug fixes will continue to be published for v2.
npm install node-fetch@2
Alternatively, you can use the async import()
function from CommonJS to load node-fetch
asynchronously:
// mod.cjs
const fetch = (...args) => import('node-fetch').then(({default: fetch}) => fetch(...args));
Providing global access
To use fetch()
without importing it, you can patch the global
object in node:
// fetch-polyfill.js
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
if (!globalThis.fetch) {
globalThis.fetch = fetch;
globalThis.Headers = Headers;
globalThis.Request = Request;
globalThis.Response = Response;
}
// index.js
import './fetch-polyfill'
// ...
Upgrading
Using an old version of node-fetch? Check out the following files:
Common Usage
NOTE: The documentation below is up-to-date with 3.x
releases, if you are using an older version, please check how to upgrade.
Plain text or HTML
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://github.com/');
const body = await response.text();
console.log(body);
JSON
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://api.github.com/users/github');
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
Simple Post
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/post', {method: 'POST', body: 'a=1'});
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
Post with JSON
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const body = {a: 1};
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/post', {
method: 'post',
body: JSON.stringify(body),
headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
});
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
Post with form parameters
URLSearchParams
is available on the global object in Node.js as of v10.0.0. See official documentation for more usage methods.
NOTE: The Content-Type
header is only set automatically to x-www-form-urlencoded
when an instance of URLSearchParams
is given as such:
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const params = new URLSearchParams();
params.append('a', 1);
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/post', {method: 'POST', body: params});
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
Handling exceptions
NOTE: 3xx-5xx responses are NOT exceptions, and should be handled in then()
, see the next section.
Wrapping the fetch function into a try/catch
block will catch all exceptions, such as errors originating from node core libraries, like network errors, and operational errors which are instances of FetchError. See the error handling document for more details.
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
try {
await fetch('https://domain.invalid/');
} catch (error) {
console.log(error);
}
Handling client and server errors
It is common to create a helper function to check that the response contains no client (4xx) or server (5xx) error responses:
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
class HTTPResponseError extends Error {
constructor(response, ...args) {
super(`HTTP Error Response: ${response.status} ${response.statusText}`, ...args);
this.response = response;
}
}
const checkStatus = response => {
if (response.ok) {
// response.status >= 200 && response.status < 300
return response;
} else {
throw new HTTPResponseError(response);
}
}
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/status/400');
try {
checkStatus(response);
} catch (error) {
console.error(error);
const errorBody = await error.response.text();
console.error(`Error body: ${errorBody}`);
}
Handling cookies
Cookies are not stored by default. However, cookies can be extracted and passed by manipulating request and response headers. See Extract Set-Cookie Header for details.
Advanced Usage
Streams
The "Node.js way" is to use streams when possible. You can pipe res.body
to another stream. This example uses stream.pipeline to attach stream error handlers and wait for the download to complete.
import {createWriteStream} from 'fs';
import {pipeline} from 'stream';
import {promisify} from 'util'
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const streamPipeline = promisify(pipeline);
const response = await fetch('https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/logos_page/Octocat.png');
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`unexpected response ${response.statusText}`);
await streamPipeline(response.body, createWriteStream('./octocat.png'));
In Node.js 14 you can also use async iterators to read body
; however, be careful to catch
errors -- the longer a response runs, the more likely it is to encounter an error.
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/stream/3');
try {
for await (const chunk of response.body) {
console.dir(JSON.parse(chunk.toString()));
}
} catch (err) {
console.error(err.stack);
}
In Node.js 12 you can also use async iterators to read body
; however, async iterators with streams
did not mature until Node.js 14, so you need to do some extra work to ensure you handle errors
directly from the stream and wait on it response to fully close.
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const read = async body => {
let error;
body.on('error', err => {
error = err;
});
for await (const chunk of body) {
console.dir(JSON.parse(chunk.toString()));
}
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
body.on('close', () => {
error ? reject(error) : resolve();
});
});
};
try {
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/stream/3');
await read(response.body);
} catch (err) {
console.error(err.stack);
}
Accessing Headers and other Metadata
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://github.com/');
console.log(response.ok);
console.log(response.status);
console.log(response.statusText);
console.log(response.headers.raw());
console.log(response.headers.get('content-type'));
Extract Set-Cookie Header
Unlike browsers, you can access raw Set-Cookie
headers manually using Headers.raw()
. This is a node-fetch
only API.
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://example.com');
// Returns an array of values, instead of a string of comma-separated values
console.log(response.headers.raw()['set-cookie']);
Post data using a file
import {fileFromSync} from 'fetch-blob/from.js';
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const blob = fileFromSync('./input.txt', 'text/plain');
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/post', {method: 'POST', body: blob});
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data)
node-fetch also supports any spec-compliant FormData implementations such as formdata-polyfill. But any other spec-compliant such as formdata-node works too, but we recommend formdata-polyfill because we use this one internally for decoding entries back to FormData.
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
import {FormData} from 'formdata-polyfill/esm.min.js';
// Alternative hack to get the same FormData instance as node-fetch
// const FormData = (await new Response(new URLSearchParams()).formData()).constructor
const form = new FormData();
form.set('greeting', 'Hello, world!');
const response = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/post', {method: 'POST', body: form});
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
node-fetch also support form-data but it's now discouraged due to not being spec-compliant and needs workarounds to function - which we hope to remove one day
Request cancellation with AbortSignal
You may cancel requests with AbortController
. A suggested implementation is abort-controller
.
An example of timing out a request after 150ms could be achieved as the following:
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
// AbortController was added in node v14.17.0 globally
const AbortController = globalThis.AbortController || await import('abort-controller')
const controller = new AbortController();
const timeout = setTimeout(() => {
controller.abort();
}, 150);
try {
const response = await fetch('https://example.com', {signal: controller.signal});
const data = await response.json();
} catch (error) {
if (error instanceof fetch.AbortError) {
console.log('request was aborted');
}
} finally {
clearTimeout(timeout);
}
See test cases for more examples.
API
fetch(url[, options])
url
A string representing the URL for fetchingoptions
Options for the HTTP(S) request- Returns:
Promise<Response>
Perform an HTTP(S) fetch.
url
should be an absolute URL, such as https://example.com/
. A path-relative URL (/file/under/root
) or protocol-relative URL (//can-be-http-or-https.com/
) will result in a rejected Promise
.
Options
The default values are shown after each option key.
{
// These properties are part of the Fetch Standard
method: 'GET',
headers: {}, // Request headers. format is the identical to that accepted by the Headers constructor (see below)
body: null, // Request body. can be null, or a Node.js Readable stream
redirect: 'follow', // Set to `manual` to extract redirect headers, `error` to reject redirect
signal: null, // Pass an instance of AbortSignal to optionally abort requests
// The following properties are node-fetch extensions
follow: 20, // maximum redirect count. 0 to not follow redirect
compress: true, // support gzip/deflate content encoding. false to disable
size: 0, // maximum response body size in bytes. 0 to disable
agent: null, // http(s).Agent instance or function that returns an instance (see below)
highWaterMark: 16384, // the maximum number of bytes to store in the internal buffer before ceasing to read from the underlying resource.
insecureHTTPParser: false // Use an insecure HTTP parser that accepts invalid HTTP headers when `true`.
}
Default Headers
If no values are set, the following request headers will be sent automatically:
Header | Value |
---|---|
Accept-Encoding |
gzip,deflate,br (when options.compress === true ) |
Accept |
*/* |
Connection |
close (when no options.agent is present) |
Content-Length |
(automatically calculated, if possible) |
Host |
(host and port information from the target URI) |
Transfer-Encoding |
chunked (when req.body is a stream) |
User-Agent |
node-fetch |
Note: when body
is a Stream
, Content-Length
is not set automatically.
Custom Agent
The agent
option allows you to specify networking related options which are out of the scope of Fetch, including and not limited to the following:
- Support self-signed certificate
- Use only IPv4 or IPv6
- Custom DNS Lookup
See http.Agent
for more information.
In addition, the agent
option accepts a function that returns http
(s).Agent
instance given current URL, this is useful during a redirection chain across HTTP and HTTPS protocol.
import http from 'http';
import https from 'https';
const httpAgent = new http.Agent({
keepAlive: true
});
const httpsAgent = new https.Agent({
keepAlive: true
});
const options = {
agent: function(_parsedURL) {
if (_parsedURL.protocol == 'http:') {
return httpAgent;
} else {
return httpsAgent;
}
}
};
Custom highWaterMark
Stream on Node.js have a smaller internal buffer size (16kB, aka highWaterMark
) from client-side browsers (>1MB, not consistent across browsers). Because of that, when you are writing an isomorphic app and using res.clone()
, it will hang with large response in Node.
The recommended way to fix this problem is to resolve cloned response in parallel:
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://example.com');
const r1 = await response.clone();
const results = await Promise.all([response.json(), r1.text()]);
console.log(results[0]);
console.log(results[1]);
If for some reason you don't like the solution above, since 3.x
you are able to modify the highWaterMark
option:
import fetch from 'node-fetch';
const response = await fetch('https://example.com', {
// About 1MB
highWaterMark: 1024 * 1024
});
const result = await res.clone().arrayBuffer();
console.dir(result);
Insecure HTTP Parser
Passed through to the insecureHTTPParser
option on http(s).request. See http.request
for more information.
Class: Request
An HTTP(S) request containing information about URL, method, headers, and the body. This class implements the Body interface.
Due to the nature of Node.js, the following properties are not implemented at this moment:
type
destination
mode
credentials
cache
integrity
keepalive
The following node-fetch extension properties are provided:
follow
compress
counter
agent
highWaterMark
See options for exact meaning of these extensions.
new Request(input[, options])
(spec-compliant)
input
A string representing a URL, or anotherRequest
(which will be cloned)options
[Options][#fetch-options] for the HTTP(S) request
Constructs a new Request
object. The constructor is identical to that in the browser.
In most cases, directly fetch(url, options)
is simpler than creating a Request
object.
Class: Response
An HTTP(S) response. This class implements the Body interface.
The following properties are not implemented in node-fetch at this moment:
trailer
new Response([body[, options]])
(spec-compliant)
body
AString
orReadable
streamoptions
AResponseInit
options dictionary
Constructs a new Response
object. The constructor is identical to that in the browser.
Because Node.js does not implement service workers (for which this class was designed), one rarely has to construct a Response
directly.
response.ok
(spec-compliant)
Convenience property representing if the request ended normally. Will evaluate to true if the response status was greater than or equal to 200 but smaller than 300.
response.redirected
(spec-compliant)
Convenience property representing if the request has been redirected at least once. Will evaluate to true if the internal redirect counter is greater than 0.
response.type
(deviation from spec)
Convenience property representing the response's type. node-fetch only supports 'default'
and 'error'
and does not make use of filtered responses.
Class: Headers
This class allows manipulating and iterating over a set of HTTP headers. All methods specified in the Fetch Standard are implemented.
new Headers([init])
(spec-compliant)
init
Optional argument to pre-fill theHeaders
object
Construct a new Headers
object. init
can be either null
, a Headers
object, an key-value map object or any iterable object.
// Example adapted from https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#example-headers-class
import {Headers} from 'node-fetch';
const meta = {
'Content-Type': 'text/xml',
'Breaking-Bad': '<3'
};
const headers = new Headers(meta);
// The above is equivalent to
const meta = [['Content-Type', 'text/xml'], ['Breaking-Bad', '<3']];
const headers = new Headers(meta);
// You can in fact use any iterable objects, like a Map or even another Headers
const meta = new Map();
meta.set('Content-Type', 'text/xml');
meta.set('Breaking-Bad', '<3');
const headers = new Headers(meta);
const copyOfHeaders = new Headers(headers);
Interface: Body
Body
is an abstract interface with methods that are applicable to both Request
and Response
classes.
body.body
(deviation from spec)
- Node.js
Readable
stream
Data are encapsulated in the Body
object. Note that while the Fetch Standard requires the property to always be a WHATWG ReadableStream
, in node-fetch it is a Node.js Readable
stream.
body.bodyUsed
(spec-compliant)
Boolean
A boolean property for if this body has been consumed. Per the specs, a consumed body cannot be used again.
body.arrayBuffer()
body.formData()
body.blob()
body.json()
body.text()
(spec-compliant)
- Returns:
Promise
Consume the body and return a promise that will resolve to one of these formats.
Class: FetchError
(node-fetch extension)
An operational error in the fetching process. See ERROR-HANDLING.md for more info.
Class: AbortError
(node-fetch extension)
An Error thrown when the request is aborted in response to an AbortSignal
's abort
event. It has a name
property of AbortError
. See ERROR-HANDLING.MD for more info.
TypeScript
Since 3.x
types are bundled with node-fetch
, so you don't need to install any additional packages.
For older versions please use the type definitions from DefinitelyTyped:
npm install --save-dev @types/node-fetch
Acknowledgement
Thanks to github/fetch for providing a solid implementation reference.
Team
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David Frank | Jimmy Wärting | Antoni Kepinski | Richie Bendall | Gregor Martynus |