How is an HTTP POST request made in node.js?
Here's an example of using node.js to make a POST request to the Google Compiler API:
// We need this to build our post string
var querystring = require('querystring');
var http = require('http');
var fs = require('fs');
function PostCode(codestring) {
// Build the post string from an object
var post_data = querystring.stringify({
'compilation_level' : 'ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS',
'output_format': 'json',
'output_info': 'compiled_code',
'warning_level' : 'QUIET',
'js_code' : codestring
});
// An object of options to indicate where to post to
var post_options = {
host: 'closure-compiler.appspot.com',
port: '80',
path: '/compile',
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(post_data)
}
};
// Set up the request
var post_req = http.request(post_options, function(res) {
res.setEncoding('utf8');
res.on('data', function (chunk) {
console.log('Response: ' + chunk);
});
});
// post the data
post_req.write(post_data);
post_req.end();
}
// This is an async file read
fs.readFile('LinkedList.js', 'utf-8', function (err, data) {
if (err) {
// If this were just a small part of the application, you would
// want to handle this differently, maybe throwing an exception
// for the caller to handle. Since the file is absolutely essential
// to the program's functionality, we're going to exit with a fatal
// error instead.
console.log("FATAL An error occurred trying to read in the file: " + err);
process.exit(-2);
}
// Make sure there's data before we post it
if(data) {
PostCode(data);
}
else {
console.log("No data to post");
process.exit(-1);
}
});
I've updated the code to show how to post data from a file, instead of the hardcoded string. It uses the async fs.readFile
command to achieve this, posting the actual code after a successful read. If there's an error, it is thrown, and if there's no data the process exits with a negative value to indicate failure.
Simple and dependency-free. Uses a Promise so that you can await the result. It returns the response body and does not check the response status code.
const https = require('https');
function httpsPost({body, ...options}) {
return new Promise((resolve,reject) => {
const req = https.request({
method: 'POST',
...options,
}, res => {
const chunks = [];
res.on('data', data => chunks.push(data))
res.on('end', () => {
let resBody = Buffer.concat(chunks);
switch(res.headers['content-type']) {
case 'application/json':
resBody = JSON.parse(resBody);
break;
}
resolve(resBody)
})
})
req.on('error',reject);
if(body) {
req.write(body);
}
req.end();
})
}
Usage:
async function main() {
const res = await httpsPost({
hostname: 'sentry.io',
path: `/api/0/organizations/org/releases/${changesetId}/deploys/`,
headers: {
'Authorization': `Bearer ${process.env.SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN}`,
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
body: JSON.stringify({
environment: isLive ? 'production' : 'demo',
})
})
}
main().catch(err => {
console.log(err)
})
You can use request library. https://www.npmjs.com/package/request
var request = require('request');
To post JSON data:
var myJSONObject = { ... };
request({
url: "http://josiahchoi.com/myjson",
method: "POST",
json: true, // <--Very important!!!
body: myJSONObject
}, function (error, response, body){
console.log(response);
});
To post xml data:
var myXMLText = '<xml>...........</xml>'
request({
url: "http://josiahchoi.com/myjson",
method: "POST",
headers: {
"content-type": "application/xml", // <--Very important!!!
},
body: myXMLText
}, function (error, response, body){
console.log(response);
});
EDIT: As of February 2020 request
has been deprecated
.
request
is now deprecated. It is recommended you use an alternative
In no particular order and dreadfully incomplete:
- native HTTP/S,
const https = require('https');
- node-fetch
- axios
- got
- superagent
- bent
- make-fetch-happen
- unfetch
- tiny-json-http
- needle
- urllib
Stats comparision Some code examples
Original answer:
This gets a lot easier if you use the request library.
var request = require('request');
request.post(
'http://www.yoursite.com/formpage',
{ json: { key: 'value' } },
function (error, response, body) {
if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
console.log(body);
}
}
);
Aside from providing a nice syntax it makes json requests easy, handles oauth signing (for twitter, etc.), can do multi-part forms (e.g. for uploading files) and streaming.
To install request use command npm install request