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node.jsexpresspostman

req.body empty on posts

All of a sudden this has been happening to all my projects.

Whenever I make a post in nodejs using express and body-parser req.body is an empty object.

var express    = require('express')
var bodyParser = require('body-parser')

var app = express()

// parse application/x-www-form-urlencoded
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded())

// parse application/json
app.use(bodyParser.json())

app.listen(2000);

app.post("/", function (req, res) {
  console.log(req.body) // populated!
  res.send(200, req.body);
});

Via ajax and postman it's always empty.

However via curl

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username":"xyz","password":"xyz"}' http://localhost:2000/

it works as intended.

I tried manually setting Content-type : application/json in the former but I then always get 400 bad request

This has been driving me crazy.

I thought it was that something updated in body-parser but I downgraded and it didn't help.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Solution

  • In Postman of the 3 options available for content type select "X-www-form-urlencoded" and it should work.

    Also to get rid of error message replace:

    app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded())

    With:

    app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({
  extended: true
}));

    See https://github.com/expressjs/body-parser

    The 'body-parser' middleware only handles JSON and urlencoded data, not multipart

    As @SujeetAgrahari mentioned, body-parser is now inbuilt with express.js.

    Use app.use(express.json()); to implement it in recent versions for JSON bodies. For URL encoded bodies (the kind produced by HTTP form POSTs) use app.use(express.urlencoded());