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Do you use Axios or Fetch?

Jasterix on August 12, 2019

As a lover of all things programming, I send a lot of time exploring why we follow certain conventions. More recently, I've been playing around w...

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António Avelar • Aug 13 '19 • Edited

There's one thing i find annoying when working with axios (the only module im using right now).
So i have a stack wich consists of a react web app + Node.js/Express REST api. Whenever i send a json response from my api and i need to read it in my front-end application i have to access it this way:

// response from api
// { success: true, data : [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] }

axios({...})
  .then((res) => {
     if ( res.success && res.data ) {
       //the data is in res.data.data
     }
  })

This thing happens because axios wraps all the response from the server inside response['data']. So if you're going to use the normal rest convention on your api responses you will need to access it like response['data']['data'] or like response.data.data .

Anwar • Aug 13 '19 • Edited

I just came into 2 things that should interest you (and me as well!) :

transformResponse

This is a configuration option in axios that can let us fix this behavior by returning the plain server response:

axios.get("/users", {
  transformResponse: [
    function(data) {
      return data.data;
    }
  ]
});

I find it a bit ugly to have an array of functions...

Interceptors response

Might be a more elegant way to fix it. Plus, you do not have to add it in your configuration for every request, it is done once and for all.

axios.interceptors.response.use(function (response) {
  return response.data;
});

I will try it and if it works, I might start using it again in my projects :)

António Avelar • Aug 14 '19

Thanks for your advice. That's a nice way of doing it.
I already use interceptors for listening for the 401 response status.

Although i said that's something annoying the verbosity of axios is at the same time where axios shines. We can take as an advantage the verbosity of the response and use it to enrich our logs

Jasterix • Aug 14 '19

I've been reading about Axios interceptors and it seems like a cool way to address not only HTTP errors but async problems that can pop up

António Avelar • Aug 19 '19

You're right! You can also use request interceptors to add custom headers like an authorization token in every single request, removing the need to write repetitive code

Gurkirat Singh • Nov 27 '20

You can use destructuring of the response object

// response from api
// { success: true, data : [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] }

axios({...})
  .then(({ body, ...res }) => {
     if ( body.success ) {
       console.log(body.data)  // [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
     }
  })

Anwar • Aug 13 '19 • Edited

I personnaly use fetch because of 2 reasons:

I did not understood why by default data were returned in a data key
I did not find its value over the regular fetch

Now, for 4kb more in our client bundle, this makes a pretty good tool to add in our toolbelt...

Haritsinh Gohil • Nov 27 '19

There are 2 reasons to use axios over fetch

Using fetch() there is a two-step process when handing JSON data. The first is to make the actual request and then the second is to call the .json() method on the response, where on axios you get json response by default.
And second issue with fetch() is it does not handle exceptions as intended, it does not enter in catch block when error occurs but axios works as expected in error handling.

see this medium article for details and example: fetch vs axios

Anwar • Nov 27 '19

Months have past, and I finally switched my fetch call for axios call. So much better indeed, and I found a way to overcome issue 1. I mentioned.

What made me make do the refractor is the fact that fetch would not throw proper exception if the error code were different than 200, I manually need to check if response.ok. So axios is my go to http request tool now 🤓

Jasterix • Nov 27 '19

Thanks for the concise explanation! I'll check out the blog post you shared

Gurkirat Singh • Nov 27 '20

Well the question should be "Do you use fetch or xhr?"

So if your platform has to only deal with plain text related requests with promise support, I would recommend and myself use fetch.

But everyone know that's not the case, in every web platform there is a case we have to integrate ajax and stream uploads and downloads. The fetch here fails to implement the logic. So here I would recommend and use ajax.

Now there are too many libraries implementing ajax under the hood, two of them are the most popular one. Jquery and Axios.

When you want to promises and easily maintainable code, I would prefer Axios and Jquery otherwise.

Michael Brooks • Aug 13 '19

I had this discussion recently as I've started to use fetch instead of Axios. The general responses were about browser support as Axios is compiled with Babel and will, therefore, work on more browsers then fetch will.

Also, Axios can give you progress updates on post requests and apparently has better security (I'm personally not sure on that one).

simonhaisz • Aug 13 '19

Yup. If you need to support IE or really old Android/iOS Axios is a good answer, though there are polyfills just for fetch if you want to go that way.

Bryan Lee • Aug 13 '19

A mixture of both, Axios because they're already being used in several of the existing projects I'm working on. I recently started work on a brand new spanking project and for that fetch was chosen because it's supported by all our target browsers. One less dependency is always better!

Joshua M Loran • Aug 19 '19

I use fetch unless axios is in an existing project. I also saw this article on reddit the other day. Axios project doesn't seem to be managed well and therefore may not be the tool of choice sooner than later.

I'm in the "less packages more better" camp also