Cowl

Request cowl for making requests from NodeJS/Browser/React-Native

About

Cowl is a wrapper for HTTP/S requests for use in NodeJS and the browser. React-Native is a work-in-progress. It's designed to be useable from 1 script, support bundling (via Webpack) and support sending and receiving data. It provides a simple API that uses a configuration object to make requests.

Usage

Install it by running npm install cowl.

GET requests can be made by using the configuration object or by simply passing a URL:

const { request } = require("cowl");

request("https://server.com/api").then(/* ... */);

request({
    url: "https://server.com/api"
}).then(/* ... */);

request({
    url: "https://server.com/api",
    method: "GET",
    headers: {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ..."
    }
}).then(/* ... */);

Cowl will automatically assume that JSON is being sent if the body is an Object and no Content-Type header is overridden. Cowl will read the response headers to automatically discern the type if responseType is set to "auto".

Cowl will return a Buffer instance for application/octet-stream binary responses, even if in a browser (ArrayBuffers are converted to Buffer instances).

You can set responseType to be any of the following:

• auto - Automatically detect the response type (default)
• text - Treat the response as text
• json - Treat the response as JSON
• buffer - Treat the response as a buffer (arraybuffer works in the browser, but will still return a Buffer instance)

const { request } = require("cowl");

request({
    url: "https://server.com/res/item",
    method: "GET",
    responseType: "buffer"
}).then(resp => {
    // resp.data will be a Buffer
});

Request objects form the following structure:

Response objects have the following structure:

Request failures

If a request fails or returns a status code outside the allowed range (200-399), an error is thrown. This particular error will contain some properties to help deal with the failure:

Packaging

If you're using webpack to bundle this library, make sure to check out the example in this repo. Specifically, make sure to stub fs and net:

{
    node: {
        fs: "empty",
        net: "empty"
    }
}