Usually you can use await only inside async functions. So it’s common to declare an immediately invoked async function expression to wrap it:

(async () => {
  await fetch(/* ... */)
})()

or also declare a function and then call it:

const doSomething = async () => {
  await fetch(/* ... */)
}

doSomething()

Top-level await allows us to simply run

await fetch(/* ... */)

without all this boilerplate code.

With a caveat: this only works in ES modules.

For a single JavaScript file, without a bundler, you can save it with the .mjs extension and you can use top-level await.

This is particularly useful when you need to load configuration, establish database connections, or perform other async initialization at the module level.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Callbacks
2:	Timers
3:	Promises
4:	Async functions
5:	Chaining promises
6:	Orchestrating promises
7:	▶︎ Top-level await
8:	Async with array methods
9:	Converting callbacks to async/await