How to Use URLSession with Async/Await for Network Requests in Swift

URLSession allows you to perform network requests and becomes even more powerful with its async/await APIs. You can request data from a given URL and parse it into a decoded structure before displaying its data in a view.

Popular frameworks like Alamofire aim to make it easier to perform requests, but for many apps, you can avoid using any third-party solution. This article will explain the basics of performing API requests and decoding JSON data using async/await.

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Performing a network request using async/await

You can use URLSession to perform requests using a given URL as follows:

/// Configure the URL for our request.
/// In this case, an example JSON response from httpbin.
let url = URL(string: "https://httpbin.org/get")!

/// Use URLSession to fetch the data asynchronously.
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)

We’re fetching data for a plain URL, and we get back the data and a response object if the request succeeds. This method will also succeed if a request returns a non-valid status code. For example, a 404 not found will still result in a data and response object without an error being thrown.

Passing arguments to a GET request

The above example represents a simple GET request without parameters. We can add parameters using URLComponents:

var urlComponents = URLComponents(string: "https://httpbin.org/get")!

/// Define the parameters.
let parameters: [String: String] = [
    "name": "Antoine van der Lee",
    "age": "33"
]

/// Add the query parameters to the URL.
urlComponents.queryItems = parameters.map { key, value in
    URLQueryItem(name: key, value: value)
}

/// Ensure we have a valid URL and throw a URLError if it fails.
guard let url = urlComponents.url else {
    throw URLError(.badURL)
}

/// Use URLSession to fetch the data asynchronously.
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)

The above example results in the following URL with encoded parameters:

https://httpbin.org/get?age=33&name=Antoine%20van%20der%20Lee

Performing a POST request with parameters

A POST request works differently and requires us to configure the HTTP method. We must encode the parameters as JSON body and configure the content-type header. Altogether, the code looks as follows:

/// Configure the URL for our request.
let url = URL(string: "https://httpbin.org/post")!

/// Create a URLRequest for the POST request.
var request = URLRequest(url: url)

/// Configure the HTTP method.
request.httpMethod = "POST"

/// Configure the proper content-type value to JSON.
request.setValue("application/json", forHTTPHeaderField: "Content-Type")

/// Define the struct of data and encode it to data.
let postData = PostData(name: "Antoine van der Lee", age: 33)
let jsonData = try JSONEncoder().encode(postData)

/// Pass in the data as the HTTP body.
request.httpBody = jsonData

/// Use URLSession to fetch the data asynchronously.
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(for: request)

I recommend using a struct to define the parameters to make your code less error-prone. For the above example, the structure looks as follows:

/// Define a struct to represent the data you want to send
struct PostData: Codable {
    let name: String
    let age: Int
}

Decoding JSON responses into a decodable struct

Now that we know how to send data, it’s time to dive into decoding JSON responses. I always inspect network traffic using the Xcode Simulator so I can quickly inspect the JSON returned by any request during development:

The great thing is that RocketSim will always run in the background, so you can also use it to inspect network requests that failed unexpectedly. Imagine the time saved by not having to find out how to reproduce the request failure!

We can decode the given JSON response using a JSON decoder. For this to work, we first need to define the JSON response as a decodable struct:

/// Define a struct to handle the response from httpbin.org.
struct PostResponse: Decodable {
    
    /// In this case, we can reuse the same `PostData` struct as
    /// httpbin returns the received data equally.
    let json: PostData
}

Secondly, we can use the raw data and decode it as follows:

/// Use URLSession to fetch the data asynchronously.
let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(for: request)

/// Decode the JSON response into the PostResponse struct.
let decodedResponse = try JSONDecoder().decode(PostResponse.self, from: data)

print("The JSON response contains a name: \(decodedResponse.json.name) and an age: \(decodedResponse.json.age)")

The same code works for the earlier shown GET request.

Optimizing URLSession error handling

So far, we’ve been throwing an error if anything goes wrong. However, we didn’t validate invalid response codes and didn’t benefit from typed throws. While you can go extreme with error handling, I’d like to show an example where we validate the response status code and throw a single type of error to simplify error handling on the calling side:

func performPOSTURLRequest() async throws(NetworkingError) {
    do {
        /// Configure the URL for our request.
        let url = URL(string: "https://httpbin.org/post")!
        
        /// Create a URLRequest for the POST request.
        var request = URLRequest(url: url)
        
        /// Configure the HTTP method.
        request.httpMethod = "POST"
        
        /// Configure the proper content-type value to JSON.
        request.setValue("application/json", forHTTPHeaderField: "Content-Type")
        
        /// Define the struct of data and encode it to data.
        let postData = PostData(name: "Antoine van der Lee", age: 33)
        let jsonData = try JSONEncoder().encode(postData)
        
        /// Pass in the data as the HTTP body.
        request.httpBody = jsonData
        
        /// Use URLSession to fetch the data asynchronously.
        let (data, response) = try await URLSession.shared.data(for: request)
        
        guard let statusCode = (response as? HTTPURLResponse)?.statusCode else {
            throw NetworkingError.invalidStatusCode(statusCode: -1)
        }
        
        guard (200...299).contains(statusCode) else {
            throw NetworkingError.invalidStatusCode(statusCode: statusCode)
        }
        
        /// Decode the JSON response into the PostResponse struct.
        let decodedResponse = try JSONDecoder().decode(PostResponse.self, from: data)
        
        print("The JSON response contains a name: \(decodedResponse.json.name) and an age: \(decodedResponse.json.age)")
    } catch let error as DecodingError {
        throw .decodingFailed(innerError: error)
    } catch let error as EncodingError {
        throw .encodingFailed(innerError: error)
    } catch let error as URLError {
        throw .requestFailed(innerError: error)
    } catch let error as NetworkingError {
        throw error
    } catch {
        throw .otherError(innerError: error)
    }
}

You can generalize this code for multiple requests, but the idea of error handling is clear. We catch specific types of errors and funnel them into a newly defined NetworkingError:

enum NetworkingError: Error {
    case encodingFailed(innerError: EncodingError)
    case decodingFailed(innerError: DecodingError)
    case invalidStatusCode(statusCode: Int)
    case requestFailed(innerError: URLError)
    case otherError(innerError: Error)
}

This example shows the power of typed throws and error case handling. If the status code is outside the 200 to 299 range, we throw an invalid status code error, which will fall through the catch statements. Altogether, we can now focus on switching cases on the specific NetworkingError type at callside.

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Conclusion

Modern Swift APIs combined with URLSession and async/await allow you to write a robust networking layer without needing third-party dependencies. Ideally, you would write a (personal) SDK package so you can reuse your networking layer for any app you built (I explain this in more detail here).

If you’d like to learn more about Swift Concurrency, make sure to check out any of these articles:

• MainActor usage in Swift explained to dispatch to the main thread
• How to Use URLSession with Async/Await for Network Requests in Swift
• Async await in Swift explained with code examples
• Swift 6: Incrementally migrate your Xcode projects and packages
• Concurrency-safe global variables to prevent data races
• Unit testing async/await Swift code
• Thread dispatching and Actors: understanding execution
• @preconcurrency: Incremental migration to concurrency checking
• Detached Tasks in Swift explained with code examples
• Task Groups in Swift explained with code examples
• Sendable and @Sendable closures explained with code examples
• AsyncSequence explained with Code Examples
• AsyncThrowingStream and AsyncStream explained with code examples
• Tasks in Swift explained with code examples
• Nonisolated and isolated keywords: Understanding Actor isolation
• Async let explained: call async functions in parallel
• Actors in Swift: how to use and prevent data races

Thanks!