req.body empty on posts

All of a sudden this has been happening to all my projects.

Whenever I make a post in nodejs using express and body-parser req.body is an empty object.

var express    = require('express')
var bodyParser = require('body-parser')

var app = express()

// parse application/x-www-form-urlencoded
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded())

// parse application/json
app.use(bodyParser.json())

app.listen(2000);

app.post("/", function (req, res) {
  console.log(req.body) // populated!
  res.send(200, req.body);
});

Via ajax and postman it's always empty.

However via curl

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username":"xyz","password":"xyz"}' http://localhost:2000/

it works as intended.

I tried manually setting Content-type : application/json in the former but I then always get 400 bad request

This has been driving me crazy.

I thought it was that something updated in body-parser but I downgraded and it didn't help.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

In Postman of the 3 options available for content type select "X-www-form-urlencoded" and it should work.

Also to get rid of error message replace:

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded())

With:

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

See https://github.com/expressjs/body-parser

The 'body-parser' middleware only handles JSON and urlencoded data, not multipart

As @SujeetAgrahari mentioned, body-parser is now inbuilt with express.js.

Use app.use(express.json()); to implement it in recent versions for JSON bodies. For URL encoded bodies (the kind produced by HTTP form POSTs) use app.use(express.urlencoded());

With Postman, to test HTTP post actions with a raw JSON data payload, select the raw option and set the following header parameters:

Content-Type: application/json

Also, be sure to wrap any strings used as keys/values in your JSON payload in double quotes.

The body-parser package will parse multi-line raw JSON payloads just fine.

{
	"foo": "bar"
}

Tested in Chrome v37 and v41 with the Postman v0.8.4.13 extension (body-parser v1.12.2 and express v4.12.3) with the setup below:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');

// configure the app to use bodyParser()
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({
	extended: true
}));
app.use(bodyParser.json());

// ... Your routes and methods here

I discovered, that it works when sending with content type

> "application/json"

in combination with server-side
app.use(express.json())
(As @marcelocra pointed out, the 2022 version would use)

(old version for reference)
app.use(bodyParser.json());

Now I can send via

var data = {name:"John"}
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.open("POST", theUrl, false); // false for synchronous request
xmlHttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
xmlHttp.send(data);

and the result is available in request.body.name on the server.

I made a really dumb mistake and forgot to define name attributes for inputs in my html file.

So instead of

<input type="password" class="form-control" id="password">

I have this.

<input type="password" class="form-control" id="password" name="password">

Now request.body is populated like this: { password: 'hhiiii' }

You have to check whether the body-parser middleware is set properly to the type of request(json, urlencoded).

If you have set,

app.use(bodyParser.json());

then in postman you have to send the data as raw.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/k9IdQ.png postman screenshot

If you have set,

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

then 'x-www-form-urlencoded' option should be selected.

I ran into this problem today, and what fixed it was to remove the content-type header in Postman! Very strange. Adding it here in case it helps someone.

I was following the BeerLocker tutorial here: http://scottksmith.com/blog/2014/05/29/beer-locker-building-a-restful-api-with-node-passport/

If you are doing with the postman, Please confirm these stuff when you are requesting API

For express 4.16+, no need to install body-parser, use the following:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.use(express.json());

app.post('/your/path', (req, res) => {
    const body = req.body;
    ...
}

My problem was I was creating the route first

// ...
router.get('/post/data', myController.postHandler);
// ...

and registering the middleware after the route

app.use(bodyParser.json());
//etc

due to app structure & copy and pasting the project together from examples.

Once I fixed the order to register middleware before the route, it all worked.

In postman, even after following the accepted answer, I was getting an empty request body. The issue turned out to be not passing a header called

Content-Length : <calculated when request is sent>

This header was present by default (along with 5 others) which I have disabled. Enable this and you'll receive the request body.

The error source is not defining the specific header type when the postman request is made. I simply solved it by either adding

Content-Type: application/json

Or explicitly defining the raw data type as JSON in postman while making the request also solves the problem.

Express 4.17.1

Server middleware example like this without bodyParser;

app.use(express.json());
app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

If you're GET requesting header should be like this;

{'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

If you're POST requesting header should be like this;

{'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}

I'am using on client side simple functions like this;

async function _GET(api) {
    return await (await fetch(api, {
        method: 'GET',
        mode: 'no-cors',
        cache: 'no-cache',
        credentials: 'same-origin',
        headers: {
            'Content-Type': 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
            'Connection': 'keep-alive',
            'Accept': '*',
        },
    })).json();
};

async function _POST (api, payload) {
    return await (await fetch(api, {
        method: 'POST',
        mode: 'no-cors',
        cache: 'no-cache',
        credentials: 'same-origin',
        headers: {
            'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
            'Connection': 'keep-alive',
            'Accept': '*/*',
        },
        body: new URLSearchParams(payload),
    })).json();
};

Even when i was learning node.js for the first time where i started learning it over web-app, i was having all these things done in well manner in my form, still i was not able to receive values in post request. After long debugging, i came to know that in the form i have provided enctype="multipart/form-data" due to which i was not able to get values. I simply removed it and it worked for me.

I solved this using multer as suggested above, but they missed giving a full working example, on how to do this. Basically this can happen when you have a form group with enctype="multipart/form-data". Here's the HTML for the form I had:

<form action="/stats" enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post">
  <div class="form-group">
    <input type="file" class="form-control-file" name="uploaded_file">
    <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Number of speakers" name="nspeakers">
    <input type="submit" value="Get me the stats!" class="btn btn-default">            
  </div>
</form>

And here's how to use multer to get the values and names of this form with Express.js and node.js:

var multer  = require('multer')
var upload = multer({ dest: './public/data/uploads/' })
app.post('/stats', upload.single('uploaded_file'), function (req, res) {
   // req.file is the name of your file in the form above, here 'uploaded_file'
   // req.body will hold the text fields, if there were any 
   console.log(req.file, req.body)
});

It seems if you do not use any encType (default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded) then you do get text input fields but you wouldn't get file.

If you have a form where you want to post text input and file then use multipart/form-data encoding type and in addition to that use multer middleware. Multer will parse the request object and prepare req.file for you and all other inputs fields will be available through req.body.

I believe this can solve app.use(express.json());

A similar problem happened to me, I simply mixed the order of the callback params. Make sure your are setting up the callback functions in the correct order. At least for anyone having the same problem.

router.post('/', function(req, res){});

Make sure ["key" : "type", "value" : "json"] & ["key":"Content-Type", "value":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"] is in your postman request headers

I didn't have the name in my Input ... my request was empty... glad that is finished and I can keep coding. Thanks everyone!

Answer I used by Jason Kim:

So instead of

<input type="password" class="form-control" id="password">

I have this

<input type="password" class="form-control" id="password" name="password">

you should not do JSON.stringify(data) while sending through AJAX like below.

This is NOT correct code:

function callAjax(url, data) {
    $.ajax({
        url: url,
    	type: "POST",
    	data: JSON.stringify(data),
    	success: function(d) {
    	    alert("successs "+ JSON.stringify(d));
    	}
    });
}	

The correct code is:

function callAjax(url, data) {
    $.ajax({
        url: url,
        type: "POST",
        data: data,
        success: function(d) {
            alert("successs "+ JSON.stringify(d));
        }
    });
}

I had the same problem a few minutes ago, I tried everything possible in the above answers but any of them worked.

The only thing I did, was upgrade Node JS version, I didn't know that upgrading could affect in something, but it did.

I have installed Node JS version 10.15.0 (latest version), I returned to 8.11.3 and everything is now working. Maybe body-parser module should take a fix on this.

My problem was creating the route first require("./routes/routes")(app); I shifted it to the end of the code before app.listen and it worked!

I solved this by changing the enctype of my form on the front-end:

• It was ⛔️ <form enctype="multipart/form-data">
• I changed it for ✅ <form enctype="application/json">

It was a relief to see the data eventually pop into the console ^^

Make sure that you have removed the enctype attribute at the form tag when the form is not containing any file upload input

enctype='multipart/form-data

I was using restify instead of express and ran into the same problem. The solution was to do:

server.use(restify.bodyParser());

Change app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded()); in your code to

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

and in postman, in header change Content-Type value from application/x-www-form-urlencoded to application/json

Ta:-)

Thank you all for your great answers! Spent quite some time searching for a solution, and on my side I was making an elementary mistake: I was calling bodyParser.json() from within the function :

app.use(['/password'], async (req, res, next) => {
  bodyParser.json()
  /.../
  next()
})

I just needed to do app.use(['/password'], bodyParser.json()) and it worked...

In my case, I was using Fetch API to send the POST request and in the body, I was sending an object instead of a string.

Mistake -> { body: { email: 'value' } }

I corrected by stringifying the body -> { body: JSON.stringify({ email: 'value' }) }

Just a quick input - I had the same problem(Testing my private api with insomnia) and when I added the Content-Type: application/json, it instantly worked. What was confusing me was that I had done everything pretty much the same way for the GET and POST requests, but PUT did not seem to work. I really really hope this helps get someone out of the rabbit hole of debugging!

Check your HTML tag name attribute

<input name="fname">

body-parser use tag name attribute to identify tag's.

I simply solved the issue removing any .json() or .urlencode() for app.use() both for express and body-parser because they gave me some problems. I wrote my code recreating streaming with this simply solution

app.post('/mypath',function(req,res){
   data=""
   // we can access HTTP headers
   req.on('data', chunk => {
      data+=chunk
   })
   req.on('end', () => {
      console.log(data)
      // here do what you want with data
      // Eg: js=JSON.parse(data)
   })
}