React Hooks - Making an Ajax request

Great answers so far, but I'll add a custom hook for when you want to trigger a request, because you can do that too.

function useTriggerableEndpoint(fn) {
  const [res, setRes] = useState({ data: null, error: null, loading: null });
  const [req, setReq] = useState();

  useEffect(
    async () => {
      if (!req) return;
      try {
        setRes({ data: null, error: null, loading: true });
        const { data } = await axios(req);
        setRes({ data, error: null, loading: false });
      } catch (error) {
        setRes({ data: null, error, loading: false });
      }
    },
    [req]
  );

  return [res, (...args) => setReq(fn(...args))];
}

You can create a function using this hook for a specific API method like so if you wish, but be aware that this abstraction isn't strictly required and can be quite dangerous (a loose function with a hook is not a good idea in case it is used outside of the context of a React component function).

const todosApi = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos";

function postTodoEndpoint() {
  return useTriggerableEndpoint(data => ({
    url: todosApi,
    method: "POST",
    data
  }));
}

Finally, from within your function component

const [newTodo, postNewTodo] = postTodoEndpoint();

function createTodo(title, body, userId) {
  postNewTodo({
    title,
    body,
    userId
  });
}

And then just point createTodo to an onSubmit or onClick handler. newTodo will have your data, loading and error statuses. Sandbox code right here.

You could create a custom hook called useFetch that will implement the useEffect hook.

If you pass an empty array as the second argument to the useEffect hook will trigger the request on componentDidMount. By passing the url in the array this will trigger this code anytime the url updates.

Here is a demo in code sandbox.

See code below.

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

const useFetch = (url) => {
  const [data, setData] = useState(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    async function fetchData() {
      const response = await fetch(url);
      const json = await response.json();
      setData(json);
    }
    fetchData();
  }, [url]);

  return data;
};

const App = () => {
    const URL = 'http://www.example.json';
    const result = useFetch(URL);
 
    return (
      <div>
        {JSON.stringify(result)}
      </div>
    );
}

Works just fine... Here you go:

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

const useFetch = url => {
  const [data, setData] = useState(null);
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true);

  const fetchUser = async () => {
    const response = await fetch(url);
    const data = await response.json();
    const [user] = data.results;
    setData(user);
    setLoading(false);
  };

  useEffect(() => {
    fetchUser();
  }, []);

  return { data, loading };
};

const App = () => {
  const { data, loading } = useFetch('https://api.randomuser.me/');

  return (
    <div className="App">
      {loading ? (
        <div>Loading...</div>
      ) : (
        <React.Fragment>
          <div className="name">
            {data.name.first} {data.name.last}
          </div>
          <img className="cropper" src={data.picture.large} alt="avatar" />
        </React.Fragment>
      )}
    </div>
  );
};

Live Demo:

Edit

Updated based on version change (thanks @mgol for bringing it to my attention in the comments).