How to Use Axios in Node.js

When making http requests, users have the option of using fetch() from the vanilla javascript library to be used on the frontend, or from importing node-fetch. Another option available to those developers is the axios library. Instead of having to do:

const fetch = require('node-fetch');
return fetch(`API/make/request`, {
  method: "GET",
  headers:{
    Accept: 'define what to accept',
    Authorization: "authorization"
  },
}).then(response => {
  return response
}).catch(err => {
  console.log(err);
});

You can do the following:

const res = await axios.get('https://httpbin.org/get?answer=42',{
  headers:{
    Accept: 'accept',
    Authorization: 'authorize'
  },
}).then(response => {
  return response;
}).catch(err => {
  console.log(err);
});

Or for a simple POST request:

const res = await axios.post('https://httpbin.org/post', { hello: 'world' });

res.data.json; // { hello: 'world' }

When sending requests with data, the data can be of type:

• string
• object
• ArrayBuffer
• ArrayBufferView
• URLSearchParams
• Form Data
• File
• Blob
• Stream
• Buffer

Note: Stream and Buffer is for Node only while Form Data, File, and Blob is for the browser only.

More Axios Tutorials

• Configuring maxBodyLength in Axios
• How to Send Headers With an Axios POST Request
• HTTP DELETE Requests with Body in Axios
• How to Use JSON with Axios
• How to Use the User-Agent Header in Axios
• Axios Multipart Form Data
• How to use Axios' create() Method with POST Requests