frm/superagent

Ajax with less suck - (and node.js HTTP client to match)

SuperAgent

SuperAgent is a small progressive client-side HTTP request library, and Node.js module with the same API, sporting many high-level HTTP client features. View the docs.

Installation

node:

$ npm install superagent

Works with browserify and should work with webpack

request
  .post('/api/pet')
  .send({ name: 'Manny', species: 'cat' })
  .set('X-API-Key', 'foobar')
  .set('Accept', 'application/json')
  .end(function(err, res){
    // Calling the end function will send the request
  });

Supported browsers

Tested browsers:

• Latest Android
• Latest Firefox
• Latest Chrome
• IE10 through latest. IE9 with polyfills.
• Latest iPhone
• Latest Safari

Even though IE9 is supported, a polyfill for window.FormData is required for .field(), and window.btoa is needed to use basic auth.

Plugins

SuperAgent is easily extended via plugins.

var nocache = require('superagent-no-cache');
var request = require('superagent');
var prefix = require('superagent-prefix')('/static');

request
  .get('/some-url')
  .use(prefix) // Prefixes *only* this request
  .use(nocache) // Prevents caching of *only* this request
  .end(function(err, res){
    // Do something
  });

Existing plugins:

• superagent-no-cache - prevents caching by including Cache-Control header
• superagent-prefix - prefixes absolute URLs (useful in test environment)
• superagent-suffix - suffix URLs with a given path
• superagent-mock - simulate HTTP calls by returning data fixtures based on the requested URL
• superagent-mocker — simulate REST API
• superagent-cache - SuperAgent with built-in, flexible caching (compatible with SuperAgent 1.x)
• superagent-jsonapify - A lightweight json-api client addon for superagent
• superagent-serializer - Converts server payload into different cases
• superagent-use - A client addon to apply plugins to all requests.
• superagent-httpbackend - stub out requests using AngularJS' $httpBackend syntax
• superagent-throttle - queues and intelligently throttles requests
• superagent-charset - add charset support for node's SuperAgent

Please prefix your plugin with superagent-* so that it can easily be found by others.

For SuperAgent extensions such as couchdb and oauth visit the wiki.

Running node tests

Install dependencies:

$ npm install

Run em!

$ make test

Running browser tests

Install dependencies:

$ npm install

Start the test runner:

$ make test-browser-local

Visit http://localhost:4000/__zuul in your browser.

Edit tests and refresh your browser. You do not have to restart the test runner.

Packaging Notes for Developers

npm (for node) is configured via the package.json file and the .npmignore file. Key metadata in the package.json file is the version field which should be changed according to semantic versioning and have a 1-1 correspondence with git tags. So for example, if you were to git show v1.5.0:package.json | grep version, you should see "version": "1.5.0", and this should hold true for every release. This can be handled via the npm version command. Be aware that when publishing, npm will presume the version being published should also be tagged in npm as latest, which is OK for normal incremental releases. For betas and minor/patch releases to older versions, be sure to include --tag appropriately to avoid an older release getting tagged as latest.

npm (for browser standalone) When we publish versions to npm, we run make superagent.js which generates the standalone superagent.js file via browserify, and this file is included in the package published to npm (but this file is never checked into the git repository). If users want to install via npm but serve a single .js file directly to the browser, the node_modules/superagent/superagent.js is a standalone browserified file ready to go for that purpose. It is not minified.

npm (for browserify) is handled via the package.json browser field which allows users to install SuperAgent via npm, reference it from their browser code with require('superagent'), and then build their own application bundle via browserify, which will use lib/client.js as the SuperAgent entrypoint.

bower is configured via the bower.json file. Bower installs files directly from git/github without any transformation.

License

MIT