got Has a Free API — Here's How to Use This Feature-Rich HTTP Client for Node.js

got is a human-friendly and powerful HTTP request library for Node.js. It supports retries, streams, pagination, caching, and more — making it ideal for building robust API integrations.

Installation

npm install got

Basic Requests

import got from "got";

// GET with JSON parsing
const data = await got("https://api.github.com/repos/sindresorhus/got").json();
console.log(`${data.full_name}: ${data.stargazers_count} stars`);

// POST with JSON body
const response = await got.post("https://httpbin.org/post", {
  json: { tool: "got", version: 14 }
}).json();

Instances with Defaults

const api = got.extend({
  prefixUrl: "https://api.example.com/v2",
  headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer token" },
  retry: { limit: 3 },
  timeout: { request: 10000 },
  responseType: "json"
});

const users = await api.get("users").json();
const user = await api.post("users", { json: { name: "New" } }).json();

Pagination — Auto-Fetch All Pages

const allItems = [];

for await (const page of got.paginate("https://api.example.com/items", {
  responseType: "json",
  pagination: {
    transform: (response) => response.body.items,
    paginate: ({ response }) => {
      const next = response.body.nextCursor;
      if (!next) return false;
      return { searchParams: { cursor: next } };
    }
  }
})) {
  allItems.push(page);
}
console.log(`Fetched ${allItems.length} items across all pages`);

Streams

import { createWriteStream } from "node:fs";
import { pipeline } from "node:stream/promises";

// Download a file with progress
await pipeline(
  got.stream("https://example.com/large-file.zip"),
  createWriteStream("output.zip")
);

Hooks

const api = got.extend({
  hooks: {
    beforeRequest: [
      (options) => { console.log(`Requesting: ${options.url}`); }
    ],
    afterResponse: [
      (response) => { console.log(`Status: ${response.statusCode}`); return response; }
    ]
  }
});

Why got?

• Built-in pagination — auto-fetch all pages
• Stream support — download large files efficiently
• HTTP/2 support — out of the box
• Caching — RFC-compliant with cacheable-request
• Retry with backoff — configurable per status code

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