Express 4: Parse JSON body

Published 2021-03-02 by Cody Freeman

Run npm install express to install Express.

To parse the body of a request, we will need to use the body-parser package that is included with Express. In this case we will accept JSON bodies from POST requests and log it to our console.

const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const http = require('http');

// Port server listens on
const PORT = 8080;

// Set up Express application
const app = express();
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.post('/', postHandler);

// Create HTTP server
http.createServer(app).listen(PORT, () => {
    console.log(`listening on ${PORT}...`);
});

// Sends 202 response and logs body
function postHandler(req, res) {
    console.log(JSON.stringify(req.body));
    res.status(202).end();
}