I got tired of rewriting the same HTTP client — so I built one

Roman Onishchenko — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:41:00 +0000

At some point, I noticed a pattern.

Almost every project I worked on had the same thing:

An HTTP client.

Not just a simple one — but something with:

retries
authentication
logging
error handling
timeouts
request lifecycle logic

And every time, it was slightly different.

Not better. Just different.

The problem

When services talk to each other, things get messy quickly.

Requests fail, timeouts happen, retries behave unpredictably, errors are inconsistent.

And instead of solving business problems, you end up rewriting infrastructure code.

Again and again.

What I wanted

I didn’t want another "just fetch wrapper".

I wanted something:

predictable
explicit
easy to reason about
flexible when needed

Especially for:

microservices
internal APIs
integration services
background jobs

So I built `@dfsync/client`

A lightweight HTTP client focused on reliable service-to-service communication in Node.js.

It’s part of an open-source toolkit:
👉 https://github.com/dfsyncjs/dfsync

Example

import { createClient } from '@dfsync/client';

const client = createClient({
  baseURL: 'https://api.service.local',
  retry: {
    attempts: 3,
    backoff: 'exponential',
    baseDelayMs: 300
  },
});

const response = await client.get('/users');

What’s already there

retry support
auth handling
request lifecycle hooks: beforeRequest, afterResponse, onError
structured error handling

What I’m working on now (0.6.x)

Right now I’m focusing on request lifecycle improvements:

AbortSignal support
request context (passing metadata through lifecycle)
correlation ID propagation (x-request-id)
improved hook context

What’s next

Planned direction:

observability (latency, retry metadata)
safer integrations (validation, idempotency)

Why I’m sharing this

This is still early, and I’d really like feedback.

Does this solve a real problem for you?
What would you expect from such a client?
What’s missing?

Links

GitHub: https://github.com/dfsyncjs/dfsync
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@dfsync/client
Website: https://dfsyncjs.github.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dfsync

If you’ve ever rewritten the same HTTP client — I’d love to hear your experience.

DEV Community: Roman Onishchenko