Replace "request" with something else

[bajtos]

request module is moving to maintenance mode, we should eventually find a new HTTP client.

• The announcement: Request’s Past, Present and Future request/request#3142
• List of alternatives: Alternative libraries to request request/request#3143
• Comparison: https://www.npmjs.com/package/got#comparison

I tried to upgrade to got. got works well for simple use cases, but stops working for non-trivial requests (e.g. when a proxy is involved). What's worse, it replaces errors reported by Node.js core with its own error classes, which makes troubleshooting extremely difficult 😞 It seems that other popular clients like node-fetch and axios are doing the same mistake 😞

(UPDATED on Jun 12, 2019)

Acceptance Criteria

• Review request alternatives (e.g. axios and node-fetch), find one that meets the following requirements:
  • It should preserve low-level stack traces reported by Node.js instead of thrown fresh error instances
  • It need to support proxies, ideally @loopback/http-caching-proxy too.
  • If it's browser-friendly, then we should choose something that's more compatible with node-fetch API.

It can be a reusable component/module where we can customize the behavior.

[seiya-git]

for proxy u can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/proxy-agent with got

[hacksparrow]

What about https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios?

Oh, you already mentioned axios.

[bajtos]

for proxy u can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/proxy-agent with got

Good to know! I was trying https://github.com/koichik/node-tunnel and that did not work.

In general, I am very reluctant to use a library that's discarding low-level stack traces reported by Node.js and replacing them with a new stack pointing only to the client library. Unfortunately, that rules out both got and axios.

[dhmlau]

@bajtos @hacksparrow, do you think we should turn this into a spike to find out what's a good substitution?

I'm thinking of the following acceptance criteria. Please review:

Acceptance Criteria

• Review the list of alternatives listed in Alternative libraries to request request/request#3143, and determine which one is the best
  • Question: what are the criteria to determine the most suited one?

[raymondfeng]

I don't have strong opinions here but axios and node-fetch seem to be two popular candidates.

[dhmlau]

Thanks @raymondfeng. How do we know which one is better? :) Any criteria to determine that?