How to disable Express BodyParser for file uploads (Node.js)

Question

This seems like it should be a fairly simple question, but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to approach it.

I'm using Node.js + Express to build a web application, and I find the connect BodyParser that express exposes to be very useful in most cases. However, I would like to have more granular access to multipart form-data POSTS as they come - I need to pipe the input stream to another server, and want to avoid downloading the whole file first.

Because I'm using the Express BodyParser, however, all file uploads are parsed automatically and uploaded and available using "request.files" before they ever get to any of my functions.

Is there a way for me to disable the BodyParser for multipart formdata posts without disabling it for everything else?

Answer 1

If you need to use the functionality provided by express.bodyParser but you want to disable it for multipart/form-data, the trick is to not use express.bodyParser directly. express.bodyParser is a convenience method that wraps three other methods: express.json, express.urlencoded, and express.multipart.

So instead of saying

app.use(express.bodyParser())

you just need to say

app.use(express.json())
   .use(express.urlencoded())

This gives you all the benefits of the bodyparser for most data while allowing you to handle formdata uploads independently.

Edit: json and urlencoded are now no longer bundled with Express. They are provided by the separate body-parser module and you now use them as follows:

bodyParser = require("body-parser")
app.use(bodyParser.json())
   .use(bodyParser.urlencoded())