Setting up a timeout for HTTP requests can prevent the connection from hanging forever, waiting for the response. It can be set on the client side to improve user experience, and on the server side to improve inter-service communication. Fetch API is fully available in Node as well from version 18.

AbortController can be utilized to set up timeouts. Instantiated abort controller has a signal property which represents reference to its associated AbortSignal object. Abort signal object is used as a signal parameter in the request with Fetch API, so HTTP request is aborted when abort method is called.

const HTTP_TIMEOUT = 3000;
const URL = 'https://www.google.com:81';
(async () => {
  const controller = new AbortController();
  const timeoutId = setTimeout(() => controller.abort(), HTTP_TIMEOUT);
  try {
    const response = await fetch(URL, {
      signal: controller.signal
    }).then((res) => res.json());
    console.log(response);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } finally {
    clearTimeout(timeoutId);
  }
})();

Use this snippet also to simulate aborted requests.

Demo

The demo with the examples is available here.