Data Fetching

Data Fetching

Nuxt provides useFetch, useLazyFetch, useAsyncData and useLazyAsyncData to handle data fetching within your application.

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useFetch, useLazyFetch, useAsyncData and useLazyAsyncData only work during setup or Lifecycle Hooks

useAsyncData

Within your pages, components and plugins you can use useAsyncData to get access to data that resolves asynchronously.

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Example

server/api/count.ts

let counter = 0
export default () => {
  counter++
  return JSON.stringify(counter)
}

app.vue

<script setup>
const { data } = await useAsyncData('count', () => $fetch('/api/count'))
</script>
<template>
  Page visits: {{ data }}
</template>

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Read and edit a live example in Examples > Composables > Use Async Data

This composable behaves identically to useAsyncData with the lazy: true option set. In other words, the async function does not block navigation. That means you will need to handle the situation where the data is null (or whatever value you have provided in a custom default factory function).

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Example

<template>
  <div>
    {{ pending ? 'Loading' : count }}
  </div>
</template>
<script setup>
const { pending, data: count } = useLazyAsyncData('count', () => $fetch('/api/count'))
watch(count, (newCount) => {
  // Because count starts out null, you won't have access
  // to its contents immediately, but you can watch it.
})
</script>

useFetch

Within your pages, components and plugins you can use useFetch to universally fetch from any URL.

This composable provides a convenient wrapper around useAsyncData and $fetch. It automatically generates a key based on URL and fetch options, as well as infers API response type.

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Read more in API > Composables > Use Fetch.

Example

app.vue

<script setup>
const { data } = await useFetch('/api/count')
</script>
<template>
  Page visits: {{ data.count }}
</template>

🔎

Read and edit a live example in Examples > Composables > Use Fetch

useLazyFetch

This composable behaves identically to useFetch with the lazy: true option set. In other words, the async function does not block navigation. That means you will need to handle the situation where the data is null (or whatever value you have provided in a custom default factory function).

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Example

<template>
  <!-- you'll need to handle a loading state -->
  <div v-if="pending">
    Loading ...
  </div>
  <div v-else>
    <div v-for="post in posts">
      <!-- do something -->
    </div>
  </div>
</template>
<script setup>
const { pending, data: posts } = useLazyFetch('/api/posts')
watch(posts, (newPosts) => {
  // Because posts starts out null, you won't have access
  // to its contents immediately, but you can watch it.
})
</script>

Refreshing Data

Sometimes throughout the course of your user’s page visit, you may need to refresh the data loaded from the API. This can happen if the user chooses to paginate, filter results, search, etc.

You can make use of the refresh() method returned from the useAsyncData() composable to refresh the data with different query parameters:

<script setup>
const page = ref(1);
const { data:users, loading, refresh, error } = await useFetch(() => `users?page=${page.value}&take=6`, { baseURL: config.API_BASE_URL }
);
function previous(){
  page.value--;
  refresh();
}
function next() {
  page.value++;
  refresh();
}
</script>

The key to making this work is to call the refresh() method returned from the useFetch() composable when a query parameter has changed.

refreshNuxtData

Invalidate the cache of useAsyncData, useLazyAsyncData, useFetch and useLazyFetch and trigger the refetch.

This method is useful if you want to refresh all the data fetching for a current page.

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Read more in API > Utils > Refresh Nuxt Data.

Example

<template>
  <div>
    {{ pending ? 'Loading' : count }}
  </div>
  <button @click="refresh">Refresh</button>
</template>
<script setup>
const { pending, data: count } = useLazyAsyncData('count', () => $fetch('/api/count'))
const refresh = () => refreshNuxtData('count')
</script>

Isomorphic fetch and $fetch

When we call fetch in the browser, user headers like cookie will be directly sent to the API. But during server-side-rendering, since the fetch request takes place ‘internally’ within the server, it doesn’t include the user’s browser cookies, nor does it pass on cookies from the fetch response.

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Example: Pass client headers to the API

We can use useRequestHeaders to access and proxy cookies to the API from server-side.

The example below adds the request headers to an isomorphic fetch call to ensure that the API endpoint has access to the same cookie header originally sent by the user.

<script setup>
const { data } = useFetch('/api/me', {
  headers: useRequestHeaders(['cookie'])
})
</script>

Be very careful before proxying headers to an external API and just include headers that you need.
Not all headers are safe to be bypassed and might introduce unwanted behavior.
Here is a list of common headers that are NOT to be proxied:

host, accept
content-length, content-md5, content-type
x-forwarded-host, x-forwarded-port, x-forwarded-proto
cf-connecting-ip, cf-ray

Example: Pass on cookies from server-side API calls on SSR response

If you want to pass on/proxy cookies in the other direction, from an internal request back to the client, you will need to handle this yourself.

composables/fetch.ts

export const fetchWithCookie = async (url: string, cookieName: string) => {
  const response = await $fetch.raw(url)
  if (process.server) {
    const cookies = Object.fromEntries(
      response.headers.get('set-cookie')?.split(',').map((a) => a.split('='))
    )
    if (cookieName in cookies) {
      useCookie(cookieName).value = cookies[cookieName]
    }
  }
  return response._data
}

<script setup lang="ts">
// This composable will automatically pass on a cookie of our choice.
const result = await fetchWithCookie("/api/with-cookie", "test")
onMounted(() => console.log(document.cookie))
</script>

Best practices

The data returned by these composables will be stored inside the page payload. This means that every key returned that is not used in your component will be added to the payload.

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We strongly recommend you only select the keys that you will use in your component.

Imagine that /api/mountains/everest returns the following object:

{
  "title": "Mount Everest",
  "description": "Mount Everest is Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China–Nepal border runs across its summit point",
  "height": "8,848 m",
  "countries": [
    "China",
    "Nepal"
  ],
  "continent": "Asia",
  "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Everest_kalapatthar.jpg/600px-Everest_kalapatthar.jpg"
}

If you plan to only use title and description in your component, you can select the keys by chaining the result of $fetch or pick option:

<script setup>
const { data: mountain } = await useFetch('/api/mountains/everest', { pick: ['title', 'description'] })
</script>
<template>
  <h1>{{ mountain.title }}</h1>
  <p>{{ mountain.description }}</p>
</template>

Using async setup

If you are using async setup(), the current component instance will be lost after the first await. (This is a Vue 3 limitation.) If you want to use multiple async operations, such as multiple calls to useFetch, you will need to use <script setup> or await them together at the end of setup.

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Using <script setup> is recommended, as it removes the limitation of using top-level await. Read more

<script>
export default defineComponent({
  async setup() {
    const [{ data: organization }, { data: repos }] = await Promise.all([
      useFetch(`https://api.github.com/orgs/nuxt`),
      useFetch(`https://api.github.com/orgs/nuxt/repos`)
    ])
    return {
      organization,
      repos
    }
  }
})
</script>
<template>
  <header>
    <h1>{{ organization.login }}</h1>
    <p>{{ organization.description }}</p>
  </header>
</template>

Directly calling an API Endpoint

There are instances where you may need to directly call the API. Nuxt 3 provides a globally available $fetch method using unjs/ohmyfetch (in addition to fetch) with the same API as the Fetch API.

Using $fetch has a number of benefits, including:

It will handle ‘smartly’ making direct API calls if it’s running on the server, or making a client-side call to your API if it’s running on the client. (It can also handle calling third-party APIs.)

Plus, it comes with convenience features including automatically parsing responses and stringifying data.