request

Deprecated!

As of Feb 11th 2020, request is fully deprecated. No new changes are expected to land. In fact, none have landed for some time.

For more information about why request is deprecated and possible alternatives refer to this issue.

Request - Simplified HTTP client

Super simple to use

Request is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http calls. It supports HTTPS and follows redirects by default.

const request = require('request');
request('http://www.google.com', function (error, response, body) {
  console.error('error:', error); // Print the error if one occurred
  console.log('statusCode:', response && response.statusCode); // Print the response status code if a response was received
  console.log('body:', body); // Print the HTML for the Google homepage.
});

Table of contents

• Streaming
• Promises & Async/Await
• Forms
• HTTP Authentication
• Custom HTTP Headers
• OAuth Signing
• Proxies
• Unix Domain Sockets
• TLS/SSL Protocol
• Support for HAR 1.2
• All Available Options

Request also offers convenience methods like request.defaults and request.post, and there are lots of usage examples and several debugging techniques.

---

Streaming

You can stream any response to a file stream.

request('http://google.com/doodle.png').pipe(fs.createWriteStream('doodle.png'))

You can also stream a file to a PUT or POST request. This method will also check the file extension against a mapping of file extensions to content-types (in this case application/json) and use the proper content-type in the PUT request (if the headers don’t already provide one).

fs.createReadStream('file.json').pipe(request.put('http://mysite.com/obj.json'))

Request can also pipe to itself. When doing so, content-type and content-length are preserved in the PUT headers.

request.get('http://google.com/img.png').pipe(request.put('http://mysite.com/img.png'))

Request emits a "response" event when a response is received. The response argument will be an instance of http.IncomingMessage.

request
  .get('http://google.com/img.png')
  .on('response', function(response) {
    console.log(response.statusCode) // 200
    console.log(response.headers['content-type']) // 'image/png'
  })
  .pipe(request.put('http://mysite.com/img.png'))

To easily handle errors when streaming requests, listen to the error event before piping:

request
  .get('http://mysite.com/doodle.png')
  .on('error', function(err) {
    console.error(err)
  })
  .pipe(fs.createWriteStream('doodle.png'))

Now let’s get fancy.

http.createServer(function (req, resp) {
  if (req.url === '/doodle.png') {
    if (req.method === 'PUT') {
      req.pipe(request.put('http://mysite.com/doodle.png'))
    } else if (req.method === 'GET' || req.method === 'HEAD') {
      request.get('http://mysite.com/doodle.png').pipe(resp)
    }
  }
})

You can also pipe() from http.ServerRequest instances, as well as to http.ServerResponse instances. The HTTP method, headers, and entity-body data will be sent. Which means that, if you don't really care about security, you can do:

http.createServer(function (req, resp) {
  if (req.url === '/doodle.png') {
    const x = request('http://mysite.com/doodle.png')
    req.pipe(x)
    x.pipe(resp)
  }
})

And since pipe() returns the destination stream in ≥ Node 0.5.x you can do one line proxying. :)

req.pipe(request('http://mysite.com/doodle.png')).pipe(resp)

Also, none of this new functionality conflicts with requests previous features, it just expands them.

const r = request.defaults({'proxy':'http://localproxy.com'})

http.createServer(function (req, resp) {
  if (req.url === '/doodle.png') {
    r.get('http://google.com/doodle.png').pipe(resp)
  }
})

You can still use intermediate proxies, the requests will still follow HTTP forwards, etc.

back to top

---

Promises & Async/Await

request supports both streaming and callback interfaces natively. If you'd like request to return a Promise instead, you can use an alternative interface wrapper for request. These wrappers can be useful if you prefer to work with Promises, or if you'd like to use async/await in ES2017.

Several alternative interfaces are provided by the request team, including:

• request-promise (uses Bluebird Promises)
• request-promise-native (uses native Promises)
• request-promise-any (uses any-promise Promises)

Also, util.promisify, which is available from Node.js v8.0 can be used to convert a regular function that takes a callback to return a promise instead.

back to top

---

Forms

request supports application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data form uploads. For multipart/related refer to the multipart API.

application/x-www-form-urlencoded (URL-Encoded Forms)

URL-encoded forms are simple.

request.post('http://service.com/upload', {form:{key:'value'}})
// or
request.post('http://service.com/upload').form({key:'value'})
// or
request.post({url:'http://service.com/upload', form: {key:'value'}}, function(err,httpResponse,body){ /* ... */ })

multipart/form-data (Multipart Form Uploads)

For multipart/form-data we use the form-data library by @felixge. For the most cases, you can pass your upload form data via the formData option.

…

For advanced cases, you can access the form-data object itself via r.form(). This can be modified until the request is fired on the next cycle of the event-loop. (Note that this calling form() will clear the currently set form data for that request.)

// NOTE: Advanced use-case, for normal use see 'formData' usage above
const r = request.post('http://service.com/upload', function optionalCallback(err, httpResponse, body) {...})
const form = r.form();
form.append('my_field', 'my_value');
form.append('my_buffer', Buffer.from([1, 2, 3]));
form.append('custom_file', fs.createReadStream(__dirname + '/unicycle.jpg'), {filename: 'unicycle.jpg'});

See the form-data README for more information & examples.

multipart/related

Some variations in different HTTP implementations require a newline/CRLF before, after, or both before and after the boundary of a multipart/related request (using the multipart option). This has been observed in the .NET WebAPI version 4.0. You can turn on a boundary preambleCRLF or postamble by passing them as true to your request options.

…

back to top

---

HTTP Authentication

request.get('http://some.server.com/').auth('username', 'password', false);
// or
request.get('http://some.server.com/', {
  'auth': {
    'user': 'username',
    'pass': 'password',
    'sendImmediately': false
  }
});
// or
request.get('http://some.server.com/').auth(null, null, true, 'bearerToken');
// or
request.get('http://some.server.com/', {
  'auth': {
    'bearer': 'bearerToken'
  }
});

If passed as an option, auth should be a hash containing values:

• user || username
• pass || password
• sendImmediately (optional)
• bearer (optional)

The method form takes parameters auth(username, password, sendImmediately, bearer).

sendImmediately defaults to true, which causes a basic or bearer authentication header to be sent. If sendImmediately is false, then request will retry with a proper authentication header after receiving a 401 response from the server (which must contain a WWW-Authenticate header indicating the required authentication method).

Note that you can also specify basic authentication using the URL itself, as detailed in RFC 1738. Simply pass the user:password before the host with an @ sign:

const username = 'username',
    password = 'password',
    url = 'http://' + username + ':' + password + '@some.server.com';

request({url}, function (error, response, body) {
   // Do more stuff with 'body' here
});

Digest authentication is supported, but it only works with sendImmediately set to false; otherwise request will send basic authentication on the initial request, which will probably cause the request to fail.

Bearer authentication is supported, and is activated when the bearer value is available. The value may be either a String or a Function returning a String. Using a function to supply the bearer token is particularly useful if used in conjunction with defaults to allow a single function to supply the last known token at the time of sending a request, or to compute one on the fly.

back to top

---

Custom HTTP Headers

HTTP Headers, such as User-Agent, can be set in the options object. In the example below, we call the github API to find out the number of stars and forks for the request repository. This requires a custom User-Agent header as well as https.

const request = require('request');

const options = {
  url: 'https://api.github.com/repos/request/request',
  headers: {
    'User-Agent': 'request'
  }
};

function callback(error, response, body) {
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
    const info = JSON.parse(body);
    console.log(info.stargazers_count + " Stars");
    console.log(info.forks_count + " Forks");
  }
}

request(options, callback);

back to top

---

OAuth Signing

OAuth version 1.0 is supported. The default signing algorithm is HMAC-SHA1:

…

For RSA-SHA1 signing, make the following changes to the OAuth options object:

• Pass signature_method : 'RSA-SHA1'
• Instead of consumer_secret, specify a private_key string in PEM format

For PLAINTEXT signing, make the following changes to the OAuth options object:

• Pass signature_method : 'PLAINTEXT'

To send OAuth parameters via query params or in a post body as described in The Consumer Request Parameters section of the oauth1 spec:

• Pass transport_method : 'query' or transport_method : 'body' in the OAuth options object.
• transport_method defaults to 'header'

To use Request Body Hash you can either

• Manually generate the body hash and pass it as a string body_hash: '...'
• Automatically generate the body hash by passing body_hash: true

back to top

---

Proxies

If you specify a proxy option, then the request (and any subsequent redirects) will be sent via a connection to the proxy server.

If your endpoint is an https url, and you are using a proxy, then request will send a CONNECT request to the proxy server first, and then use the supplied connection to connect to the endpoint.

That is, first it will make a request like:

HTTP/1.1 CONNECT endpoint-server.com:80
Host: proxy-se