How to get “HTTP_REFERER” with koa in nodejs?

Question

How can I get the referrer from the request object? The variable this.request.headers['referer'] was empty.

Answer 1

If your page was referred by another page, the referer will be accessable through this.headers.referer.

If the page was not refered by another page (was loaded directly), this.headers.referer will be undefined.

This demo code:

'use strict'
const Koa = require('koa')
let app = new Koa()
app.use(function * () {
  console.log(this.headers)
})

app.listen(8888)

Yielded this when referred by another page:

{ host: 'localhost:8888',
  'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0',
  accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
  'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
  'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
  referer: 'http://localhost:1111/',
  connection: 'keep-alive' }

And this when loaded directly:

{ host: 'localhost:8888',
  'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0',
  accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
  'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
  'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
  connection: 'keep-alive' }