Relative paths with fetch in Javascript

Question

When you say fetch('data.json') you are effectively requesting http://yourdomain.com/data.json since it is relative to the page your are making the request from. You should lead with forward slash, which will indicate that the path is relative to the domain root: fetch('/js/data.json'). Or fully quality with your domain fetch('http://yourdomain.com/js/data.json').

This is not exactly a recommendation since it relies on a number of things that aren't guaranteed to work everywhere or to continue to work into the future, however it works for me in the places I need it to and it might help you.

const getRunningScript = () => {
    return decodeURI(new Error().stack.match(/([^ \n\(@])*([a-z]*:\/\/\/?)*?[a-z0-9\/\\]*\.js/ig)[0])
}

fetch(getRunningScript() + "/../config.json")
  .then(req => req.json())
  .then(config => {
    // code
  })

An easy way to understand why it must be the case is to consider what should happen if we write a helper function in app/js/helper/logfetch.js:

// app/js/helper/logfetch.js
function logFetch(resource) {
    console.log('Fetching', resource);
    return fetch(resource);
}

Now, consider what happens if we use logFetch from app/js/app.js:

// app/js/app.js
fetch('data.json');    // if this is relative to js/, then ...
logFetch('data.json'); // should this be relative to js/ or js/helper/?

We might want these two calls to return the same thing - but if fetch is relative to the contained file, then logFetch would request js/helper/data.json instead of something consistent with fetch.

If fetch could sense where it is called from, then to implement helper libraries such as logFetch, the JavaScript would need a whole range of new caller-location-aware functionality.

In contrast, performing the fetch relative to the HTML file provides more consistency.

CSS works differently because it doesn't have the complexity of method calling: you can't create "helper CSS modules" that transform other CSS modules, so the idea of relative paths is a lot more conceptually cleaner.