Request -- Simplified HTTP request method

Install

  npm install request

Super simple to use

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

request(options, callback)

The first argument is an options object. The only required option is uri, all others are optional.

• 'uri' - fully qualified uri or a parsed url object from url.parse()
• 'method' - http method, defaults to GET
• 'headers' - http headers, defaults to {}
• 'body' - entity body for POST and PUT requests
• 'client' - existing http client object (when undefined a new one will be created and assigned to this property so you can keep around a reference to it if you would like use keep-alive on later request)
• 'followRedirect - follow HTTP 3xx responses as redirects. defaults to true.
• 'requestBodyStream - Stream to read request body chunks from.
• 'responseBodyStream - Stream to write body chunks to. When set this option will be passed as the last argument to the callback instead of the entire body.

The callback argument gets 3 arguments. The first is an error when applicable (usually from the http.Client option not the http.ClientRequest object). The second in an http.ClientResponse object. The third is the response body buffer.

Example:

  var request = require('request');
  request({uri:'http://www.google.com'}, function (error, response, body) {
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
      sys.puts(body) // Print the google web page.
    }
  })

It's also worth noting that the options argument will mutate. When following a redirect the uri values will change. After setting up a client options it will set the client property.