JavaScript Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20. Remote Data

Data surrounds us. We create and interact with data throughout our daily lives, often in interesting and unexpected ways. When building Node applications, we often interact with data. At times, that data may be something that we’ve created for the application, or data that the user has entered into our system. However, it’s also common to need to interact with data that comes from outside of our applications. This chapter covers best practices and techniques for working with remote data in Node applications.

Fetching Remote Data

Problem

You want to make a request to a remote server within your Node application.

Solution

Use node-fetch, one of the most popular and widely used modules, which brings the browser’s window.fetch to Node. It’s installed with npm:

$ npm install node-fetch

and can be used as simply as:

const fetch = require('node-fetch');

fetch('https://oreilly.com')
  .then(res => res.text())
  .then(body => console.log(body));

Discussion

node-fetch provides an API that closely mirrors the browser’s window.fetch, allowing our Node programs to access remote resources. Like window.fetch, it offers support for the HTTP methods of GET, POST, DELETE, and PUT. In the case of GET, if the response indicates success (a status code of 200), you can then process the returned data (formatted as HTML in this instance) however you would like.

You can make a request for a JSON resource:

fetch('https://swapi.dev/api/people/1')
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then ...