SWR is a lightweight React Hooks library designed for efficient data fetching. It provides a minimal API to handle data requests, caching, revalidation, and request deduplication, ensuring UIs are fast, consistent, and always up-to-date. Developers can fetch data with a single hook, which manages the request lifecycle, caches responses, and keeps data fresh, providing `data`, `error`, and `isLoading` states to drive the UI.
SWR covers various aspects of speed, correctness, and stability, including fast page navigation, polling, data dependency management, revalidation on focus/network recovery, local mutation (Optimistic UI), smart error retry, pagination, and scroll position recovery. It is lightweight and agnostic, supporting any data source like REST, GraphQL, or custom fetchers. Built with native React ergonomics, it's compatible with Suspense, SSR, and SSG, and is fully typed, making it suitable for modern React applications.