Node.js request object documentation?

Benjamin Collins picture Benjamin Collins · Jun 22, 2013 · Viewed 57.9k times · Source

This is a pretty straight forward question, but I haven't found anything on Google. I'm looking for documentation on the request parameter in Node.js's create server function, but I haven't been able to find anything.

http.createServer(function(request, response){
  console.log(JSON.stringify(request));
});

Debugging with JSON.stringify() gives me an error, that the object is circular and the program stops. I've seen different things like request.url, or request.body, but is there a page documenting all of the request functions and parameters? It seems like it should be easy to find, I just can't seem to find it.

I tried it again, and it turns out just doing console.log(request) writes out all of the data from the request. Here it is just as a reference:

ondata: [Function],
     _httpMessage:
      { domain: null,
        _events: [Object],
        _maxListeners: 10,
        output: [],
        outputEncodings: [],
        writable: true,
        _last: false,
        chunkedEncoding: false,
        shouldKeepAlive: true,
        useChunkedEncodingByDefault: true,
        sendDate: true,
        _hasBody: true,
        _trailer: '',
        finished: false,
        _hangupClose: false,
        socket: [Circular],
        connection: [Circular] } },
  connection:
   { _connecting: false,
     _handle:
      { fd: null,
        writeQueueSize: 0,
        owner: [Circular],
        onread: [Function: onread],
        reading: true },
     _readableState:
      { highWaterMark: 16384,
        buffer: [],
        length: 0,
        pipes: null,
        pipesCount: 0,
        flowing: false,
        ended: false,
        endEmitted: false,
        reading: true,
        calledRead: true,
        sync: false,
        needReadable: true,
        emittedReadable: false,
        readableListening: false,
        objectMode: false,
        defaultEncoding: 'utf8',
        ranOut: false,
        awaitDrain: 0,
        readingMore: false,
        decoder: null,
        encoding: null },
     readable: true,
     domain: null,
     _events:
      { end: [Object],
        finish: [Function: onSocketFinish],
        _socketEnd: [Function: onSocketEnd],
        drain: [Function: ondrain],
        timeout: [Function],
        error: [Function],
        close: [Object] },
     _maxListeners: 10,
     _writableState:
      { highWaterMark: 16384,
        objectMode: false,
        needDrain: false,
        ending: false,
        ended: false,
        finished: false,
        decodeStrings: false,
        defaultEncoding: 'utf8',
        length: 0,
        writing: false,
        sync: true,
        bufferProcessing: false,
        onwrite: [Function],
        writecb: null,
        writelen: 0,
        buffer: [] },
     writable: true,
     allowHalfOpen: true,
     onend: [Function],
     destroyed: false,
     errorEmitted: false,
     bytesRead: 357,
     _bytesDispatched: 0,
     _pendingData: null,
     _pendingEncoding: '',
     server:
      { domain: null,
        _events: [Object],
        _maxListeners: 10,
        _connections: 1,
        connections: [Getter/Setter],
        _handle: [Object],
        _usingSlaves: false,
        _slaves: [],
        allowHalfOpen: true,
        httpAllowHalfOpen: false,
        timeout: 120000,
        _connectionKey: '4:0.0.0.0:1337' },
     _idleTimeout: 120000,
     _idleNext:
      { _idleNext: [Circular],
        _idlePrev: [Circular],
        msecs: 120000,
        ontimeout: [Function: listOnTimeout] },
     _idlePrev:
      { _idleNext: [Circular],
        _idlePrev: [Circular],
        msecs: 120000,
        ontimeout: [Function: listOnTimeout] },
     _idleStart: 1371952289619,
     parser:
      { _headers: [],
        _url: '',
        onHeaders: [Function: parserOnHeaders],
        onHeadersComplete: [Function: parserOnHeadersComplete],
        onBody: [Function: parserOnBody],
        onMessageComplete: [Function: parserOnMessageComplete],
        socket: [Circular],
        incoming: [Circular],
        maxHeaderPairs: 2000,
        onIncoming: [Function] },
     ondata: [Function],
     _httpMessage:
      { domain: null,
        _events: [Object],
        _maxListeners: 10,
        output: [],
        outputEncodings: [],
        writable: true,
        _last: false,
        chunkedEncoding: false,
        shouldKeepAlive: true,
        useChunkedEncodingByDefault: true,
        sendDate: true,
        _hasBody: true,
        _trailer: '',
        finished: false,
        _hangupClose: false,
        socket: [Circular],
        connection: [Circular] } },
  httpVersion: '1.1',
  complete: false,
  headers:
   { host: 'localhost:1337',
     connection: 'keep-alive',
     'cache-control': 'max-age=0',
     accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
     'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
 Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.116 Safari/537.36',
     'accept-encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
     'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' },
  trailers: {},
  _pendings: [],
  _pendingIndex: 0,
  url: '/',
  method: 'GET',
  statusCode: null,
  client:
   { _connecting: false,
     _handle:
      { fd: null,
        writeQueueSize: 0,
        owner: [Circular],
        onread: [Function: onread],
        reading: true },
     _readableState:
      { highWaterMark: 16384,
        buffer: [],
        length: 0,
        pipes: null,
        pipesCount: 0,
        flowing: false,
        ended: false,
        endEmitted: false,
        reading: true,
        calledRead: true,
        sync: false,
        needReadable: true,
        emittedReadable: false,
        readableListening: false,
        objectMode: false,
        defaultEncoding: 'utf8',
        ranOut: false,
        awaitDrain: 0,
        readingMore: false,
        decoder: null,
        encoding: null },
     readable: true,
     domain: null,
     _events:
      { end: [Object],
        finish: [Function: onSocketFinish],
        _socketEnd: [Function: onSocketEnd],
        drain: [Function: ondrain],
        timeout: [Function],
        error: [Function],
        close: [Object] },
     _maxListeners: 10,
     _writableState:
      { highWaterMark: 16384,
        objectMode: false,
        needDrain: false,
        ending: false,
        ended: false,
        finished: false,
        decodeStrings: false,
        defaultEncoding: 'utf8',
        length: 0,
        writing: false,
        sync: true,
        bufferProcessing: false,
        onwrite: [Function],
        writecb: null,
        writelen: 0,
        buffer: [] },
     writable: true,
     allowHalfOpen: true,
     onend: [Function],
     destroyed: false,
     errorEmitted: false,
     bytesRead: 357,
     _bytesDispatched: 0,
     _pendingData: null,
     _pendingEncoding: '',
     server:
      { domain: null,
        _events: [Object],
        _maxListeners: 10,
        _connections: 1,
        connections: [Getter/Setter],
        _handle: [Object],
        _usingSlaves: false,
        _slaves: [],
        allowHalfOpen: true,
        httpAllowHalfOpen: false,
        timeout: 120000,
        _connectionKey: '4:0.0.0.0:1337' },
     _idleTimeout: 120000,
     _idleNext:
      { _idleNext: [Circular],
        _idlePrev: [Circular],
        msecs: 120000,
        ontimeout: [Function: listOnTimeout] },
     _idlePrev:
      { _idleNext: [Circular],
        _idlePrev: [Circular],
        msecs: 120000,
        ontimeout: [Function: listOnTimeout] },
     _idleStart: 1371952289619,
     parser:
      { _headers: [],
        _url: '',
        onHeaders: [Function: parserOnHeaders],
        onHeadersComplete: [Function: parserOnHeadersComplete],
        onBody: [Function: parserOnBody],
        onMessageComplete: [Function: parserOnMessageComplete],
        socket: [Circular],
        incoming: [Circular],
        maxHeaderPairs: 2000,
        onIncoming: [Function] },
     ondata: [Function],
     _httpMessage:
      { domain: null,
        _events: [Object],
        _maxListeners: 10,
        output: [],
        outputEncodings: [],
        writable: true,
        _last: false,
        chunkedEncoding: false,
        shouldKeepAlive: true,
        useChunkedEncodingByDefault: true,
        sendDate: true,
        _hasBody: true,
        _trailer: '',
        finished: false,
        _hangupClose: false,
        socket: [Circular],
        connection: [Circular] } },
  _consuming: false,
  _dumped: false,
  httpVersionMajor: 1,
  httpVersionMinor: 1,
  upgrade: false }

Answer

Delio picture Delio · Jun 22, 2013

I'm not sure if this is a correct reply as it seems straightforward to me, but did you have a look at http://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_http_incomingmessage?

Request is instance of the above object. By the way, if you really want to see what's inside that object with "brute force," you should not parse it, as it will not be a JSON string at all, but instead do something like:

for (i in request) {
  //Your code here
}

Hope it helps.