posting to a remote url with expressjs

Question

posting to a remote url with expressjs

i have this in my server.js

app.post("/leadAPI/ed",function(request,response){
//api post code here
});

In this post request i need to post data contained in request body to some external API with a specific URL and send the response back using response.send. How to do it in a clean fashion. Is there anything build in for this in expressjs?

node.js
backbone.js
express

Answer 1

As Andreas mentioned, this isn't express's duty. Its duty is to invoke your function when an HTTP request comes in.

You can use node's built-in HTTP client, as Andreas also mentioned in a comment, to make a request to your external site.

Try something like this:

var http = require('http');

app.post("/leadAPI/ed", function(request, response) {
  var proxyRequest = http.request({
      host: 'remote.site.com',
      port: 80,
      method: 'POST',
      path: '/endpoint/url'
    },
    function (proxyResponse) {
      proxyResponse.on('data', function (chunk) {
        response.send(chunk);
      });
    });

  proxyRequest.write(response.body);
  proxyRequest.end();
});

I'm sure you'll need to adapt it to handle chunked responses and figure out the transfer-encoding, but that is the gist of what you need.

For details, see

http://nodejs.org/api/http.html

Answer 2

I would use Mikeal Rogers' request library for this:

var request = require('request');

app.post("/leadAPI/ed",function(req, res){
  var remote = request('remote url');

  req.pipe(remote);
  remote.pipe(res);
});