freeCodeCamp Challenge Guide: Use body-parser to Parse POST Requests

Guide
1

Use body-parser to Parse POST Requests

Problem Explanation

The body-parser should already be added to your project if you used the provided boilerplate, but if not it should be there as:

"dependencies": {
    "body-parser": "^1.19.0",
    
    "express": "^4.17.1"
}

You can run npm install body-parser to add it as a dependency to your project instead of manually adding it to the package.json file.

This guide assumes you have imported the body-parser module into your file as bodyParser.

In order to import the same, you just need to add the following line at the top of your file:

var bodyParser = require("body-parser");

All you need to do for this challenge is pass the middleware to app.use(). Make sure it comes before the paths it needs to be used on. Remember that body-parser returns with bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: false}). Use the following as a template:

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

In order to parse JSON data sent in the POST request, use bodyParser.json() as the middleware as shown below:

app.use(bodyParser.json());

The data received in the request is available in the req.body object.

Do not forget that all these statements need to go above any routes that might have been defined.

21 Likes