Making Outbound Requests

Global fetch in Node.js

Since Node.js 18, the fetch API is available globally — no import, no npm install. It is the same Web Fetch API you use in the browser:

// No import needed in Node 18+
const response = await fetch('https://api.example.com/data');
const data = await response.json();

This is a huge improvement over the older http.request approach which required manually assembling chunks from a readable stream.

Fetching JSON from a public API

The fetch function returns a Promise that resolves to a Response object. Call .json() on the response to parse the body as JSON — this also returns a Promise, so you await it too.

Node.js

const http = require('node:http');

// Demonstrate fetch inside a Node server
const server = http.createServer(async function(req, res) {
  if (req.method === 'GET' && req.url === '/post') {
    try {
      // Built-in fetch — no npm package needed (Node 18+)
      const response = await fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1');

      if (!response.ok) {
        throw new Error('API error: ' + response.status);
      }

      const post = await response.json();

      res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
      res.end(JSON.stringify({ title: post.title, userId: post.userId }));
    } catch (err) {
      res.writeHead(500, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
      res.end(JSON.stringify({ error: err.message }));
    }
  } else {
    res.writeHead(404, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
    res.end('Try GET /post');
  }
});

server.listen(3000, function() {
  console.log('Server at http://localhost:3000 - try /post');
});

Needs the Node.js runtime — open in StackBlitz to run.

Error handling with fetch

fetch does not throw on non-2xx HTTP status codes. You must check response.ok (a boolean that is true for status codes 200–299) yourself:

Node.js

const http = require('node:http');

const server = http.createServer(async function(req, res) {
  try {
    // Fetch a non-existent resource — returns 404
    const response = await fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/99999');

    // fetch only throws for network errors, not HTTP errors
    if (!response.ok) {
      res.writeHead(response.status, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
      res.end(JSON.stringify({
        error: 'Upstream error',
        status: response.status,
        statusText: response.statusText
      }));
      return;
    }

    const data = await response.json();
    res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
    res.end(JSON.stringify(data));
  } catch (networkErr) {
    // Only thrown on DNS failure, connection refused, etc.
    res.writeHead(503, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' });
    res.end(JSON.stringify({ error: 'Network error: ' + networkErr.message }));
  }
});

server.listen(3000, function() {
  console.log('Error-handling demo at http://localhost:3000');
});

Needs the Node.js runtime — open in StackBlitz to run.

A note on http.request

Before fetch, outbound HTTP requests in Node.js used http.request() from the node:http module. It is a lower-level API based on streams. You may encounter it in older codebases:

// Older pattern — collecting chunks manually
const http = require('node:http');

http.get('http://example.com', function(res) {
  let body = '';
  res.on('data', function(chunk) { body += chunk; });
  res.on('end', function() { console.log(body); });
});

For new code, prefer the global fetch — it is cleaner, Promise-based, and isomorphic with browser code.