Do you use Axios or Fetch?

Jasterix Aug 12 Updated on Aug 19, 2019 ・1 min read

#discuss #axios #javascript #ajax

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 with hosting an API on Heroku. Most of the tutorials used Axios, with no thought to the decision. Several hours later, it's still not clear if
1) the industry is moving towards using Axios
2) there are certain scenarios where Axios is the best tool
3) it's something else altogether

Would love to hear your thoughts on the two

ThisYoutube video offers an interesting POV, but he ultimately defaults to Fetch

DISCUSS (15)

António Avelar

Aug 13

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 .

Khalyomede

Aug 13

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

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

THREAD

Jasterix

Author

Aug 14

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

THREAD

António Avelar

Aug 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

Khalyomede

Aug 13

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...

Michael Brooks

Aug 13

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

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.

Joshua M Loran

Aug 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

Bryan Lee

Aug 13

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!