File uploading with Express 4.0: req.files undefined

Question

The body-parser module only handles JSON and urlencoded form submissions, not multipart (which would be the case if you're uploading files).

For multipart, you'd need to use something like connect-busboy or multer or connect-multiparty (multiparty/formidable is what was originally used in the express bodyParser middleware). Also FWIW, I'm working on an even higher level layer on top of busboy called reformed. It comes with an Express middleware and can also be used separately.

Here is what i found googling around:

var fileupload = require("express-fileupload");
app.use(fileupload());

Which is pretty simple mechanism for uploads

app.post("/upload", function(req, res)
{
    var file;

    if(!req.files)
    {
        res.send("File was not found");
        return;
    }

    file = req.files.FormFieldName;  // here is the field name of the form

    res.send("File Uploaded");


});

1) Make sure that your file is really sent from the client side. For example you can check it in Chrome Console: screenshot

2) Here is the basic example of NodeJS backend:

const express = require('express');
const fileUpload = require('express-fileupload');
const app = express();

app.use(fileUpload()); // Don't forget this line!

app.post('/upload', function(req, res) {
   console.log(req.files);
   res.send('UPLOADED!!!');
});

It looks like body-parser did support uploading files in Express 3, but support was dropped for Express 4 when it no longer included Connect as a dependency

After looking through some of the modules in mscdex's answer, I found that express-busboy was a far better alternative and the closest thing to a drop-in replacement. The only differences I noticed were in the properties of the uploaded file.

console.log(req.files) using body-parser (Express 3) output an object that looked like this:

{ file: 
   { fieldName: 'file',
     originalFilename: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     name: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg'
     path: 'uploads/6323-16v7rc.jpg',
     type: 'image/jpeg',
     headers: 
      { 'content-disposition': 'form-data; name="file"; filename="360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg"',
        'content-type': 'image/jpeg' },
     ws: 
      WriteStream { /* ... */ },
     size: 48614 } }

compared to console.log(req.files) using express-busboy (Express 4):

{ file: 
   { field: 'file',
     filename: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     file: 'uploads/9749a8b6-f9cc-40a9-86f1-337a46e16e44/file/360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     mimetype: 'image/jpeg',
     encoding: '7bit',
     truncated: false
     uuid: '9749a8b6-f9cc-40a9-86f1-337a46e16e44' } }

multer is a middleware which handles “multipart/form-data” and magically & makes the uploaded files and form data available to us in request as request.files and request.body.

installing multer :- npm install multer --save

in .html file:-

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="/upload">
    <input type="hidden" name="msgtype" value="2"/>
    <input type="file" name="avatar" />
    <input type="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>

in .js file:-

var express = require('express');
var multer = require('multer');
var app = express();
var server = require('http').createServer(app);
var port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
var upload = multer({ dest: 'uploads/' });

app.use(function (req, res, next) {
  console.log(req.files); // JSON Object
  next();
});

server.listen(port, function () {
  console.log('Server successfully running at:-', port);
});

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.sendFile(__dirname + '/public/file-upload.html');
})

app.post('/upload', upload.single('avatar'),  function(req, res) {
  console.log(req.files); // JSON Object
});

Hope this helps!