SuperAgent Has a Free API — Here's How to Use This Flexible HTTP Client

SuperAgent is a progressive HTTP client for Node.js and browsers. Its chainable API makes building complex requests intuitive and readable.

Installation

npm install superagent

Basic Requests

import request from "superagent";

// GET with query parameters
const { body } = await request
  .get("https://api.github.com/search/repositories")
  .query({ q: "web scraping", sort: "stars", per_page: 5 })
  .set("User-Agent", "superagent-example");

body.items.forEach(repo => console.log(`${repo.full_name}: ${repo.stargazers_count} stars`));

POST and PUT

// POST JSON
const response = await request
  .post("https://httpbin.org/post")
  .send({ name: "SuperAgent", type: "http-client" })
  .set("Content-Type", "application/json");

console.log(response.body.json);

// PUT with auth
await request
  .put("https://api.example.com/users/1")
  .auth("username", "password")
  .send({ name: "Updated Name" });

File Upload

const response = await request
  .post("https://httpbin.org/post")
  .attach("file", "path/to/document.pdf")
  .field("description", "My document");

console.log(response.body.files);

Retry Logic

const { body } = await request
  .get("https://api.example.com/data")
  .retry(3) // Retry up to 3 times on network errors
  .timeout({ response: 5000, deadline: 30000 });

Plugins

// Create a reusable plugin
function authPlugin(req) {
  req.set("Authorization", `Bearer ${getToken()}`);
  req.set("X-Request-ID", crypto.randomUUID());
  return req;
}

const data = await request
  .get("https://api.example.com/me")
  .use(authPlugin)
  .then(res => res.body);

Chainable Response Handling

request
  .get("https://api.example.com/stream")
  .on("progress", (event) => {
    console.log(`${event.percent}% complete`);
  })
  .pipe(createWriteStream("output.dat"));

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