How to render pdf in expressjs from axios response

Question

I have a code like this:

const axios = require('axios');
const express = require('express');

const app = express();

app.get('/', async (request, response) => {
  const {
    params: { accountId },
  } = request;

  try {
    const { data } = await axios.get('https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf');

    response.setHeader('content-type', 'application/pdf');
    response.setHeader('content-type', 'application/pdf');
    response.send(Buffer.from(data, 'binary'));
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error.message);
  }
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log(`Server app listening on port 3000`);
});

Why expressjs render empty PDF file instead of https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf?

Playground

Answer 1

You just need to modify this code, Set responseType to arraybuffer: This tells axios to handle the response as raw binary data instead of trying to parse it as JSON.

By default in axios it is in JSON format

const axios = require('axios');
const express = require('express');

const app = express();

app.get('/', async (request, response) => {
  const {
    params: { accountId },
  } = request;

  try {
    // const { data } = await axios.get('https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf');
    const { data } = await axios.get('https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf', {
      responseType: 'arraybuffer',
    });
    response.setHeader('content-type', 'application/pdf');
    response.contentType('application/pdf');
    response.send(Buffer.from(data, 'binary'));
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error.message);
  }
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log(`Server app listening on port 3000`);
});

Here is forked version working