Ky Has a Free API That Makes HTTP Requests in JavaScript Elegant

Ky is a tiny HTTP client by Sindre Sorhus. It wraps fetch with retries, timeouts, hooks, and JSON handling — in just 3KB.

Basic Usage

import ky from "ky";

// GET with JSON parsing
const data = await ky.get("https://api.example.com/products").json();

// POST
const created = await ky.post("https://api.example.com/products", {
  json: { title: "Widget", price: 29.99 },
}).json();

// PUT, PATCH, DELETE
await ky.put("https://api.example.com/products/1", { json: { price: 24.99 } });
await ky.delete("https://api.example.com/products/1");

Retry: Built-In Resilience

const data = await ky.get("https://api.example.com/data", {
  retry: {
    limit: 3,
    methods: ["get"],
    statusCodes: [408, 429, 500, 502, 503, 504],
    backoffLimit: 3000,
  },
  timeout: 10000,
}).json();

Hooks: Intercept Requests

const api = ky.create({
  prefixUrl: "https://api.example.com",
  hooks: {
    beforeRequest: [
      (request) => {
        request.headers.set("Authorization", `Bearer ${getToken()}`);
      },
    ],
    afterResponse: [
      async (request, options, response) => {
        if (response.status === 401) {
          const newToken = await refreshToken();
          request.headers.set("Authorization", `Bearer ${newToken}`);
          return ky(request);
        }
      },
    ],
    beforeRetry: [
      ({ retryCount }) => {
        console.log(`Retry attempt ${retryCount}`);
      },
    ],
  },
});

const products = await api.get("products").json();

Search Params

const data = await ky.get("https://api.example.com/search", {
  searchParams: {
    q: "web scraping",
    page: 1,
    limit: 20,
    sort: "relevance",
  },
}).json();

Form Data and Blobs

// Upload file
const formData = new FormData();
formData.append("file", blob, "data.csv");
formData.append("name", "export");

await ky.post("https://api.example.com/upload", { body: formData });

// Download as blob
const blob = await ky.get("https://api.example.com/export.csv").blob();

vs fetch vs axios

Feature	fetch	Ky	axios
Size	0KB	3KB	29KB
Retry	No	Yes	Plugin
Timeout	No	Yes	Yes
JSON shortcut	No	Yes	Yes
Hooks	No	Yes	Yes
Browser + Node	Yes	Yes	Yes

---

Make HTTP requests for scraping? My Apify tools handle the heavy lifting.

Custom HTTP solution? Email [e-mail]