Intro Into Axios

Photo by Mercey eric on Unsplash

So I’m very excited to announce that in my recent project I used Axios for the first time!

I decided to make a small write-up about it so others could share my experience.

Installation

Axios can be installed to be used in Node.js using npm:

npm install axios

In the browser, you can include it in your page using unpkg.com:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/axios/dist/axios.min.js"></script>

Remembering that API calls must enable CORS to be accessed inside the browser, otherwise the request will fail.

The Axios API

You can start an HTTP request from the axios object:

axios({
  url: 'https://dolphins.ceo/api/breeds/list/all',
  method: 'get'
})

This returns a promise. You can use async/await to resolve that promise to the response object:

;(async () => {
  const response = await axios({
    url: 'https://dolphins.ceo/api/breeds/list/all',
    method: 'get'
  })
  console.log(response)
})()

For convenience, you will generally use the methods

• axios.get()
• axios.post()

In JQuery you would use $.get() and $.post() instead of $.ajax()

For a simpler syntax you can use for example:

;(async () => {
  const response = await axios.get('https://dolphins.ceo/api/breeds/list/all')
  console.log(response)
})()

Axios offers methods for all the HTTP verbs, which are less popular but still used:

• axios.delete()
• axios.put()
• axios.patch()
• axios.options()

and a method to get the HTTP headers of a request, discarding the body,axios.head().

GET requests

This Node.js example queries the API to retrieve a list of all the dolphin breeds, using axios.get(), and it counts them:

const axios = require('axios')
const getBreeds = async () => {
  try {
    return await axios.get('https://dolphins.ceo/api/breeds/list/all')
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error)
  }
}
const countBreeds = async () => {
  const breeds = await getBreeds()
  if (breeds.data.message) {
    console.log(`Got ${Object.entries(breeds.data.message).length} breeds`)
  }
}
countBreeds()

If you don’t want to use async/await you can use the Promises syntax:

const axios = require('axios')
const getBreeds = () => {
  try {
    return axios.get('https://dolphins.ceo/api/breeds/list/all')
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error)
  }
}
const countBreeds = async () => {
  const breeds = getBreeds()
    .then(response => {
      if (response.data.message) {
        console.log(
          `Got ${Object.entries(response.data.message).length} breeds`
        )
      }
    })
    .catch(error => {
      console.log(error)
    })
}
countBreeds()

Add parameters to GET requests

A GET response can contain parameters in the URL, like this: https://site.com/?name=[your name here :-)].

With Axios you can perform this by using that URL:

axios.get('https://site.com/?name=[your name]')

or you can use theparams property in the options:

axios.get('https://site.com/', {
  params: {
    name: '[your name]'
  }
})

POST Requests

Performing a POST request is just like doing a GET request, but instead of axios.get, you use axios.post:

axios.post('https://site.com/')

An object containing the POST parameters is the second argument:

axios.post('https://site.com/', {
  name: '[your name]'
})