How to get byte size of request?

Question

I am making an API in Node.js Express which might get large requests coming in. I would really like to see how big the request are.

//....
router.post('/apiendpoint', function(req, res, next) {
  console.log("The size of incoming request in bytes is");
  console.log(req.????????????); //How to get this?
});
//....

Answer 1

You can use req.socket.bytesRead or you can use the request-stats module.

var requestStats = require('request-stats');
var stats = requestStats(server);

stats.on('complete', function (details) {
    var size = details.req.bytes;
});

The details object looks like this:

{
    ok: true,           // `true` if the connection was closed correctly and `false` otherwise 
    time: 0,            // The milliseconds it took to serve the request 
    req: {
        bytes: 0,         // Number of bytes sent by the client 
        headers: { ... }, // The headers sent by the client 
        method: 'POST',   // The HTTP method used by the client 
        path: '...'       // The path part of the request URL 
    },
    res  : {
        bytes: 0,         // Number of bytes sent back to the client 
        headers: { ... }, // The headers sent back to the client 
        status: 200       // The HTTP status code returned to the client 
    }
}

So you can get the request size from details.req.bytes.

Another option is req.headers['content-length'] (but some clients might not send this header).