Steps to send a https request to a rest service in Node js

Note if you are using https.request do not directly use the body from res.on('data',... This will fail if you have a large data coming in chunks. So you need to concatenate all the data and then process the response in res.on('end'. Example -

  var options = {
    hostname: "www.google.com",
    port: 443,
    path: "/upload",
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(post_data)
    }
  };

  //change to http for local testing
  var req = https.request(options, function (res) {
    res.setEncoding('utf8');

    var body = '';

    res.on('data', function (chunk) {
      body = body + chunk;
    });

    res.on('end',function(){
      console.log("Body :" + body);
      if (res.statusCode != 200) {
        callback("Api call failed with response code " + res.statusCode);
      } else {
        callback(null);
      }
    });

  });

  req.on('error', function (e) {
    console.log("Error : " + e.message);
    callback(e);
  });

  // write data to request body
  req.write(post_data);
  req.end();

just use the core https module with the https.request function. Example for a POST request (GET would be similar):

var https = require('https');

var options = {
  host: 'www.google.com',
  port: 443,
  path: '/upload',
  method: 'POST'
};

var req = https.request(options, function(res) {
  console.log('STATUS: ' + res.statusCode);
  console.log('HEADERS: ' + JSON.stringify(res.headers));
  res.setEncoding('utf8');
  res.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log('BODY: ' + chunk);
  });
});

req.on('error', function(e) {
  console.log('problem with request: ' + e.message);
});

// write data to request body
req.write('data\n');
req.write('data\n');
req.end();

The easiest way is to use the request module.

request('https://example.com/url?a=b', function (error, response, body) {
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
    console.log(body);
  }
});