Node.js - How to send data from html to express

Question

this is form example in html:

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Answer 1

I'd like to expand on Obertklep's answer. In his example it is an NPM module called body-parser which is doing most of the work. Where he puts req.body.name, I believe he/she is using body-parser to get the contents of the name attribute(s) received when the form is submitted.

If you do not want to use Express, use querystring which is a built-in Node module. See the answers in the link below for an example of how to use querystring.

It might help to look at this answer, which is very similar to your quest.

Answer 2

Using http.createServer is very low-level and really not useful for creating web applications as-is.

A good framework to use on top of it is Express, and I would seriously suggest using it. You can install it using npm install express.

When you have, you can create a basic application to handle your form:

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

//Note that in version 4 of express, express.bodyParser() was
//deprecated in favor of a separate 'body-parser' module.
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true })); 

//app.use(express.bodyParser());

app.post('/myaction', function(req, res) {
  res.send('You sent the name "' + req.body.name + '".');
});

app.listen(8080, function() {
  console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/');
});

You can make your form point to it using:

<form action="http://127.0.0.1:8080/myaction" method="post">

The reason you can't run Node on port 80 is because there's already a process running on that port (which is serving your index.html). You could use Express to also serve static content, like index.html, using the express.static middleware.