Replace node-fetch with undici

[Ethan-Arrowood]

Confirm this is a feature request for the Node library and not the underlying OpenAI API.

• [X] This is a feature request for the Node library

Describe the feature or improvement you're requesting

I noticed this library is still using node-fetch because Node's native fetch is considered experimental.

I think it'd be in the libraries best interest to switch to undici instead. Undici is the fetch implementation in Node.js. For all intents and purposes it is stable (https://github.com/nodejs/undici/issues/1737). We (the maintainers of Undici) have some concerns about marking it as such in Node.js just yet because of the nature of the Fetch api spec (it itself adds breaking changes occasionally - this doesn't fit well with Node.js versioning strategy. It's complicated - read the issue I linked above for more details).

Switching the undici for the shim will enable a significantly easier upgrade path in the future whenever we figure out how to mark it as properly stable in Node.js

Happy to help swap this out too if the maintainers approve 😄 🚀

Additional context

No response

[rattrayalex]

Hi @Ethan-Arrowood,

Thanks for raising this, it's something we'd be open to – and I appreciate the offer of help.

There are a few related packages we rely on in the node-fetch ecosystem we rely on as well; could you help advise on replacements?

They are:

1. agentkeepalive for reusing connections
2. formdata-node and form-data-encoder for multipart file uploads
3. abort-controller (I assume this will Just Work with undici?)

[Ethan-Arrowood]

1. Undici's agent is keep-alive by default 😄 and completely customizable too.
2. We have our own spec compliant formdata implementation directly in undici
3. Native AbortController just works 😄

[rattrayalex]

Great!

1. Do you know of docs or a guide on how to configure your keep-alive agent to disable Nagle's algorithm and get other optimizations from agentkeepalive? I'm sure we can figure this out ourselves, would just save some eng time.
2. That's great to hear. Do you simply export FormData classes and similar? I'm not immediately finding that in the docs. What about Blob and File classes? (Right now we have to use a third party dep for those as well).
3. Great, looks like native AbortController is supported in all non-EOL Node versions now (and has been for a while - I was just behind the times).

If you'd be willing to take a crack at porting this, it'd certainly be tremendously appreciated. I think the toughest part will be our file uploads machinery (especially mucking without cross-environment support). We have pretty extensive tests (look for ecosystem-tests). You're welcome to ping by email with any questions.

If that proves to be too big an ask, we can add this to our roadmap, it does sound like a good thing to do.

[Ethan-Arrowood]

Yeah apologies our docs aren't ideal. There is a ton of extensibility though.

1. https://undici.nodejs.org/#/docs/api/Agent is our docs on the Agent class. Combine this with this https://undici.nodejs.org/#/?id=undicisetglobaldispatcherdispatcher method and you can customize the Agent that all fetch calls will use by default. I can't remember exactly how this would play if a downstream user overwrites it though with their own call to setGlobalDispatcher so the custom agent can also be passed to the fetch call directly via the dispatcher option (https://github.com/nodejs/undici/blob/63afd9b5e28380dc86de29ade69adaad7efcd231/types/fetch.d.ts#L117).
2. Yes we do! All those exist. Yeah the docs don't make that obvious (wow I really gotta fix that 😅 ) but here is the code path for File and FormData: https://github.com/nodejs/undici/blob/main/index.js#L119-L120 and Blob is non-experimental in Node since v18 https://nodejs.org/api/buffer.html#class-blob
3. 🎉

Happy to do so! Let me take a swing at things next week.

I'll also say, are you strictly tied to using Fetch for some sort of interim reasons? Or is the Node.js part of this distinct enough that you could use a better networking client? Undici itself has much better APIs such as .request and .stream and .pipeline that deliver significantly faster throughput than Fetch. The library is an official Node.js project and is the recommended HTTP client for all new Node.js projects. Maintainers include Node.js TSC members and long time contributors.

[rattrayalex]

Interesting, I didn't know that undici offered a different, faster request interface as well.

There are a few considerations I'd have:

1. We currently use native fetch on platforms where it's available, partly because node-fetch wouldn't work in non-node envs but partly because some runtimes may desire/expect/require native fetch to be used (for example, I believe Vercel Edge Runtime manipulates outgoing requests). I don't feel strongly about doing this but if we were to move away from native fetch by default on these platforms, it would have to be a very well-researched decision with few to no tradeoffs.
2. We accept a user-provided fetch function in client instantiation, and we'd want to continue to do so.

I'd be a little worried about bifurcating our request pathways between "env-or-user-provided fetch" or "built-in undici .request et al", but if it's what you'd recommend after considering the above and exploring the codebase, I'm certainly open to it!

[Ethan-Arrowood]

Let's start with switching to undici fetch. Would love to dig in deeper in the future. I think it's an interesting problem. This is exactly what fetch in node exists for - interoperability. I think you have an amazing example of cross environment javascript sdk 😁

[rattrayalex]

Thanks Ethan! Very excited to see what you come up with!

[shoyuf]

Undici fetch does look better! 🎉

My reverse proxy for api.openai.com has a default open setting response buffer, which takes some time to buffer data on HTTP/1.1. This is not ideal for streaming output of completion data.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out this problem.

I don't know how to make node-fetch support HTTP/2, so changing to undici is a better idea.