express req.pipe() does not work

Question

1. I want to listen to incoming POST request in express.
2. I want to pipe this request to another server
3. I want to receive response inside express handler (I dont want to pipe response to express res stream)

For now I have following code:

app.post('server1',function(req,res,next){     var request = require('request');     req.pipe(request.post('server2')).pipe(res);  } 

So this does not work - request is not even piped to server2 - I checked it and there is no incoming request.

---

I solved points 1 & 2 like this:

var bodyParser = express.bodyParser();  app.use(function(req,res,next){      if(req.path == '/server1' && req.method == 'POST') {         return next();     }     else {         bodyParser(req,res,next);     } }); 

Not very nice but it works - it just disables bodyparser for a single route (POST /server1).

But I still don't know how to obtain json response body from piped request - I have following code:

app.post('/server1',function(req,res,next){      var request = require('request');     var pipe = req.pipe(request.post('/server2'));      pipe.on('end',function(){          var res2 = pipe.response;         console.log(res2);      }); }); 

res2 object has correct statusCode and headers and so on but it does not contain body - how I can get this from the res2 object? /server2 returns some data in json but I dont know how to read it from response...

Answer 1

It doesn't work because bodyParser intercepts all the bodies with parsers

Answer 2

I think you're almost there. You should listen on data events on the pipe to collect the response:

app.post('/server1',function(req,res,next) {   var request   = require('request');   var pipe      = req.pipe(request.post('/server2'));   var response  = [];    pipe.on('data',function(chunk) {      response.push(chunk);   });    pipe.on('end',function() {      var res2 = Buffer.concat(response);     console.log(res2);     // don't forget to end the 'res' response after this!     ...   }); }); 

However, since you solved the "bodyParser() getting in the way" problem, you can also use your initial pipe setup if you just want to return the response generated by server2 (also, be sure to use proper URL's when using request).