Uploading file using POST request in Node.js

Question

Uploading file using POST request in Node.js

I have problem uploading file using POST request in Node.js. I have to use request module to accomplish that (no external npms). Server needs it to be multipart request with the file field containing file's data. What seems to be easy it's pretty hard to do in Node.js without using any external module.

I've tried using this example but without success. Can anyone help?

request.post({
  uri: url,
  method: 'POST',
  multipart: [{
    body: '<FILE_DATA>'
  }]
}, function (err, resp, body) {
  if (err) {
    console.log('Error!');
  } else {
    console.log('URL: ' + body);
  }
});

node.js
multipartform-data
http-post

Answer 1

Looks like you're already using request module.

in this case all you need to post multipart/form-data is to use its form feature:

var req = request.post(url, function (err, resp, body) {
  if (err) {
    console.log('Error!');
  } else {
    console.log('URL: ' + body);
  }
});
var form = req.form();
form.append('file', '<FILE_DATA>', {
  filename: 'myfile.txt',
  contentType: 'text/plain'
});

but if you want to post some existing file from your file system, then you may simply pass it as a readable stream:

form.append('file', fs.createReadStream(filepath));

request will extract all related metadata by itself.

For more information on posting multipart/form-data see node-form-data module, which is internally used by request.

Answer 2

Thanks it works :). I also had to convert ArrayBuffer to Buffer that is used in the Node's request module. After uploading file to the server I had it in the same format that comes from the HTML5 FileAPI (I'm using Meteor). Full code below - maybe it will be helpful for others.

function toBuffer(ab) {
  var buffer = new Buffer(ab.byteLength);
  var view = new Uint8Array(ab);
  for (var i = 0; i < buffer.length; ++i) {
    buffer[i] = view[i];
  }
  return buffer;
}

var req = request.post(url, function (err, resp, body) {
  if (err) {
    console.log('Error!');
  } else {
    console.log('URL: ' + body);
  }
});
var form = req.form();
form.append('file', toBuffer(file.data), {
  filename: file.name,
  contentType: file.type
});