Node React Native Fetch API

API wrapper for ES6's fetch method used with GitHub's fetch polyfill

Familiar with packages? Jump to Usage now

* You may need to bower install --save es6-promise to support older browsers

What is this project about?

Use this package as a simple HTTP method wrapper for integrating your API in your Node and React Native projects. It's a better alternative, with less headaches (at least for me) for this use case than superagent and the default fetch Network method.

It supports and is tested for both client-side usage (e.g. with Bower, Browserify, or Webpack, with whatwg-fetch) and also server-side (with node-fetch).

Why not just use superagent or fetch?

See Background for more information.

Learning how to build an API with Node.js?

Read my article about building Node.js API's with authentication.

Index

• Usage
• API
• Tests
• Development
• Background
• Contributors
• Credits
• License

Usage

1. Install the package:

   • NPM:

     npm install --save fetch-api

   • Bower:

     bower install --save fetch-api

2. Require it, set a base URI, and call some methods:

   // require the module
   import API from 'fetch-api';
    
   // instantiate a new API instance
   let api = new API({
     baseURI: 'https://api.startup.com'
   });
    
   // log in to our API with a user/pass
   api.post('/v1/login', (err, res, user) => {
    
     // you'll probably want to handle this
     // error better than just throwing it
     if (err) throw err;
    
     // set basic auth headers for all
     // future API requests we make
     api.auth(user.api_token);
    
     // now let's post a message to our API
     api.post(
       '/v1/message',
       { body: 'Hello' },
       // if you wanted to pass JSON instead of plaintext:
       // { body: { message: 'Hello' } }
       (err, res, message) => {
         // again obviously handle this error better
         if (err) throw err;
         // do something with the response
         console.log('message', message);
       }
     );
    
   });

API

import API from 'fetch-api';

API is a function that optionally accepts an argument options, which is an object full of options for constructing your API instance.

• API - accepts an options object, with the following accepted options:

  • baseURI - the default URI to use as a prefix for all HTTP requests

    • If your API server is running on http://localhost:8080, then use that as the value for this option
    • If you use React Native, then you most likely want to set baseURI as follows (e.g. making use of __DEV__ global variable):

    let api = new API({
      baseURI: __DEV__
        ? process.env.API_BASE_URI || 'http://localhost:8080'
        : 'https://api.startup.com'
    });

    • You could also set API_BASE_URI as an environment variable, and then set the value of this option to process.env.API_BASE_URI (e.g. API_BASE_URI=http://localhost:8080 node app)

  • headers - an object containing default headers to send with every request

  • auth - will call the auth() function below and set it as a default

Upon being invoked, API returns an object with the following methods:

• api.auth([ user, pass ]) - helper function that sets BasicAuth headers, and it accepts user and pass arguments

  • If you don't pass both user and pass arguments, then it removes any previously set BasicAuth headers from prior auth() calls
  • If you pass only a user, then it will set pass to an empty string '')
  • If you pass : then it will assume you are trying to set BasicAuth headers using your own user:pass string
  • If you pass more than two keys, then it will throw an error (since we BasicAuth only consists of user and pass anyways)

• All exposed HTTP methods require a path string and callback function arguments, and accept an optional options object:

  • Accepted method arguments:
    • path required - the path for the HTTP request (e.g. /v1/login, will be prefixed with the value of baseURI mentioned earlier)
    • options optional - an object containing options, such as header values, a request body, form data, or a querystring to send along with the request, here are a few examples:

      • To set a custom header value of X-Reply-To on a POST request:

        api.post('/messages', {
          headers: {
            'X-Reply-To': '7s9inuna748y4l1azchi'
          }
        }, callback);

    • callback required - a callback function that gets called with the arguments of (err, res, body):
      • err - contains an error object (or null)
      • res - the response from server (it contains status code, etc)
      • body - the parsed JSON or text response (or null)
  • List of available HTTP methods:
    • api.get(path, options, callback) - GET
    • api.head(path, options, callback) - HEAD (does not currently work - see tests)
    • api.post(path, options, callback) - POST
    • api.put(path, options, callback) - PUT
    • api.del(path, options, callback) - DELETE
    • api.options(path, options, callback) - OPTIONS (does not currently work - see tests)
    • api.patch(path, options, callback) - PATCH

Tests

This package is tested to work with whatwg-fetch and node-fetch.

This means that it is compatible for both client-side and server-side usage.

Development

Watch the src directory for changes with npm run watch and when you are done, run npm test.

Background

Facebook recommends to use superagent with React Native, but it does not work properly, therefore I went with the next best solution, their fetch package. After having several issues trying to use fetch and writing my own API wrapper for a project with it (and running into roadblocks along the way) -- I decided to publish this.

Here were the issues I discovered/filed related to this:

• https://github.com/github/fetch/issues/235
• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4376
• https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent/issues/636
• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/863
• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/370
• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/10

I know that solutions like superagent exist, but they don't seem to work well with React Native (which was my use case for this package).

In addition, the authors of the spec for ES6's fetch support throwing errors instead of catching them and bubbling them up to the callback/promise.

Therefore I created fetch-api to serve as my API glue, and hopefully it'll serve as yours too.

Contributors

• Nick Baugh niftylettuce@gmail.com

Credits

• https://gist.github.com/anthonator/0dc0310a931398490fab

License

MIT