How is an HTTP POST request made in node.js?

Question

How can I make an outbound HTTP POST request, with data, in node.js?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.