Number one this week, Gretchen is a HTTP client for the browser built on top of fetch API.

The main difference with similar solutions like Ky or Fetch-Retry is the error handling and the TypeScript support, as it aims to be a “type-safe fetch”.

It does not throw errors but returns either a data object or an error object, for error code statuses.

Let’s see how an example of code looks like:

type UserType = {
  name: string;
};
type ErrorType = {
  messages: string[];
};

const { error, data } = await gretch<UserType, ErrorType>(
  "/user/12345"
).json();

if (error) {
  // error is typeof ErrorType
} else if (data) {
  // data is typeof UserType
}

It’s an interesting option when you know the shape your errors will have.