Fetch wasn't added to Node.js as a core package until version 18, and wasn't considered stable until version 21. Axios has been around much longer and was made part of popular frameworks and tutorials, which helps continue to propagate it's usage.
These are so much better than the interface fetch offers you, unfortunately.
fetch('https://api.example.com/data', {
headers: {
'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + accessToken
}1- automatically add bearer tokens to requests rather than manually specifying them every single time
2- automatically dispatch some event or function when a 401 response is returned to clear the stale user session and return them to a login page.
There's no reason to repeat this logic in every single place you make an API call.
Likewise, every response I get is JSON. There's no reason to manually unwrap the response into JSON every time.
Finally, there's some nice mocking utilities for axios for unit testing different responses and error codes.
You're either going to copy/paste code everywhere, or you will write your own helper functions and never touch fetch directly. Axios... just works. No need to reinvent anything, and there's a ton of other handy features the GP mentioned as well you may or may not find yourself needing.
const myfetch = async (req, options) => {
let options = options || {};
options.headers = options.headers || {};
options.headers['Authorization'] = token;
let res = await fetch(new Request(req, options));
if (res.status == 401) {
// do your thing
throw new Error("oh no");
}
return res;
}
Because it is so few lines it is much more sensible to have everyone duplicate that little snippet manually than import a library and write interceptors for that...
(Not only because the integration with the library would likely be more lines of code, but also because a library is a significantly liability on several levels that must be justified by significant, not minor, recurring savings.)
Mine's about 100 LOC. There's a lot you can get wrong. Having a way to use a known working version and update that rather than adding a hundred potentially unnecessary lines of code is a good thing. https://github.com/mikemaccana/fetch-unfucked/blob/master/sr...
> import a library and write interceptors for that...
What you suggesting people would have to intercept? Just import a library you trust and use it.
- Don't waste time rewriting and maintaining code unecessarily. Install a package and use it.
- Have a minimum release age.
I do not know what the issue is.
fetch responses have a .json() method. It's literally the first example in MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/U...
It's literally easier than not using JSON because I have to think about if I want `repsponse.text()` or `response.body()`.
IMO interceptors are bad. they hide what might get transformed with the API call at the place it is being used.
> Likewise, every response I get is JSON. There's no reason to manually unwrap the response into JSON every time.
This is not true unless you are not interfacing with your own backends. even then why not just make a helper that unwraps as json by default but can be passed an arg to parse as something else
You can remember this answer for every time you ask same question again:
"Coz whatever else/builtin was before was annoying enough for common use cases"
I spent two years trying to get it out of a project that began long after Axios had become redundant but it's very hard to go back and challenge decisions like this because every business priority is aligned against this kind of work.
I expect libraries built on top of fetch will be the next to be compromised, because why would you use fetch without an arbitrary layer of syntactic sugar...
For example, esbuild and typescript 7 split binaries for different systems and architectures into separate packages, and rely on your package manager to pull the correct one.
Would they not have approved it for earlier versions? But also wouldn't the chance of addition automatic approval be high (for such a widely used project)?
It's also a little context dependent, for example if I was using Axios and I see a prompt to run the plain-crypto-js postinstall script, alarm bells would instantly ring, which would at least make me look up the changelog to see why this is happening.
In most cases I don't even let them run unless something breaks/doesn't work as expected.
Because axios existed before the builtin fetch, and so there's a lot of stackoverflow answers explaining how to use fetch, and the llm models are trained on that, so they will write axios requests instead of fetch