How do I POST with multipart form data using fetch?

Question

You're setting the Content-Type to be multipart/form-data, but then using JSON.stringify on the body data, which returns application/json. You have a content type mismatch.

You will need to encode your data as multipart/form-data instead of json. Usually multipart/form-data is used when uploading files, and is a bit more complicated than application/x-www-form-urlencoded (which is the default for HTML forms).

The specification for multipart/form-data can be found in RFC 1867.

For a guide on how to submit that kind of data via javascript, see here.

The basic idea is to use the FormData object (not supported in IE < 10):

async function sendData(url, data) {
  const formData  = new FormData();

  for(const name in data) {
    formData.append(name, data[name]);
  }

  const response = await fetch(url, {
    method: 'POST',
    body: formData
  });

  // ...
}

Per this article make sure not to set the Content-Type header. The browser will set it for you, including the boundary parameter.

I was recently working with IPFS and worked this out. A curl example for IPFS to upload a file looks like this:

curl -i -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=CUSTOM" -d $'--CUSTOM\r\nContent-Type: multipart/octet-stream\r\nContent-Disposition: file; filename="test"\r\n\r\nHello World!\n--CUSTOM--' "http://localhost:5001/api/v0/add"

The basic idea is that each part (split by string in boundary with --) has it's own headers (Content-Type in the second part, for example.) The FormData object manages all this for you, so it's a better way to accomplish our goals.

This translates to fetch API like this:

const formData = new FormData()
formData.append('blob', new Blob(['Hello World!\n']), 'test')

fetch('http://localhost:5001/api/v0/add', {
  method: 'POST',
  body: formData
})
.then(r => r.json())
.then(data => {
  console.log(data)
})