http-enhanced

http-enhanced

My wrappers library was a bit over the top.

This is meant to be thinner, just a few helpers for the very simply req / res that Node.js's http API provides.

However, if you don't call any of the methods, nothing changes. You'll just have some extra prototype methods lying around that never did anything.

Install

At the command line from the npm registry:

npm install http-enhanced

Or from github:

npm install git://github.com/chbrown/http-enhanced.git

Or in your package.json:

"dependencies" : {
  "http-enhanced": "*",
  ...
}

Usage

Most often, you'll create a server like this:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {

  // req (request) is an instance of http.IncomingMessage
  var url = req.url;

  // res (response) is an instance of http.ServerResponse
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
  res.write('Hello, world!');
  res.end();

}).listen(80);

A simple change will let you use some shortcuts:

var http = require('http-enhanced');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {

  // save incoming data to req.data
  req.saveData();

  // wait until the request ends, or call immediately if it already has
  req.wait(function() {
    var reversed = req.data.split('').reverse().join('');

    // 1. set HTTP status code to 200,
    // 2. the Content-Type header to 'application/json',
    // 3. and stringify the given object, all in one go:
    res.json({success: true, message: reversed});
  });

}).listen(80);

Request

wait: return immediately (with setImmediate, which replaced process.nextTick) or after the request has ended, if it has not yet ended. This is useful because the req.on('end') event might get triggered if you do some other async stuff before waiting to hear that, in which case you have to check that req.complete == true, but this rolls both checks into one function.

req.wait(function() {
  console.log("Always callback, always true! " + req.complete);
});

saveData: record incoming data req.on('data') to a string at req.data. This won't work for binary data, since it's just concatenating to a string.

req.saveData();

Response

writeEnd: res.end(data) is supposed to write the data and then end the response. From the docs:

If data is specified, it is equivalent to calling request.write(data, encoding) followed by request.end().

But sometimes it doesn't, so we make that that's what it's really equivalent to (minus the optional encoding).

res.writeEnd('Hello world');

writeAll: Roll writeHead() and writeEnd() all into one:

res.writeAll(200, 'text/xml', '<root>Haha, not really.</root>');

json: Set Content-Type to application/json and encode the object with JSON.stringify.

res.json({success: true, message: "Hello world!"});

If JSON.stringify throws an error trying to encode your object, it will fall back to util.inspect with the options: {showHidden: true, depth: null}.

html: Set status code to 200 and Content-Type to text/html.

res.html('<p><i>Hello</i> world!.</p>');

text: Set status code to 200 and Content-Type to text/plain.

res.text('Hello world.');

die: Set status code to 500 and Content-Type to text/plain.

res.text('Goodbye, cruel world.');

redirect: Set status code to 302 and the Location header to the given string. Also writes "Redirecting to: /index?error=404" (or whatever url you use).

res.redirect('/index?error=404');

License

Copyright © 2013 Christopher Brown. MIT Licensed.