Request (Javascript Library) Cheatsheet

Request is a Javascript library which is used to make rest/API calls to the other servers, return value of the request is a callback

Usage

1 Using NPM

npm i request

Hitting rest methods

GET

var request = require("request");

var options = { method: 'GET',
                url: 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1'
              };

request(options, function (error, response, body) {
  if (error) throw new Error(error);

  console.log(body);
});

POST

var request = require("request");

var options = { method: 'POST',
  url: 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos',
  headers: { 
      'content-type': 'application/json' 
  },
  body: {
    foo: 'bar'
  },
  json: true 
};

request(options, function (error, response, body) {
  if (error) throw new Error(error);

  console.log(body);
});

Streaming

We can stream response to a file using request

request('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1').pipe(fs.createWriteStream('todo.txt'))

We can also stream a file to the PUT/POST method using request method.

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

Promises and async/await

We can also return promises instead of callbacks, for this we need to use interface wrapper for request. We can also use async/await using request.