Send an http get request with parameters in Node.js

Question

I'm trying to send a GET request from a Node.js app to a Rails server. Currently, I am using the request module like so:

var request = require("request");
var url = 'www.example.com'

function sendRequest(url){
  string = 'http://localhost:3000/my-api-controller?url=' + url;
  request.get(string, function(error, response, body){
    console.log(body);
  });
}

This works. But what I would like is not to build the string for a get request, but to pass parameters of the request as a javascript object (in a jQuery-like fashion). There is one example on the wiki page of the request module that uses exactly this kind of syntax:

request.get('http://some.server.com/', {
  'auth': {
    'user': 'username',
    'pass': 'password',
    'sendImmediately': false
  }
});

However, when I tried to adapt this syntax for my purposes like so:

function sendRequest(url){
  request.get('http://localhost:3000/my-api-controller', {url: url}, function(error, response, body){
    console.log(body);
  });
}

the url parameter did not get sent.

So my question is, am I doing something wrong here or does the request module not support passing parameters of a get request as a javascript object? And if it doesn't, could you suggest a handy Node module that does?

Answer 1

The "HTTP Authentication" example you point to in the request module does not build a query string, it adds authentication headers based on specific options. There's another part of that page that describes what you want:

request.get({url: "http://localhost:3000/my-api-controller", 
             qs: {url: url}},
            function(error, response, body){
               console.log(body);
            });

Something like that. This, in turn, uses the querystring module to build the query string, as was mentioned in the comments.

Answer 2

The object provided to request() or its convenience methods isn't just for data parameters.

To provide { url: url } to be sent in the query-string, you'll want to use the qs option.

request.get('http://localhost:3000/my-api-controller', {
    qs: { url: url }
}, function(error, response, body){
    // ...
});