Needle

The leanest and most handsome HTTP client in the Nodelands. With only two dependencies, it supports:

• HTTP and HTTPS requests
• Basic & Digest auth
• Forwarding via proxy
• Multipart form-data (e.g. file uploads)
• Gzip/deflate compression
• Automatic XML & JSON parsing
• 301/302 redirect following
• Decodes non-UTF-8 content.

Ideal for performing simple, quick HTTP requests in Node.js. If you need OAuth, AWS support or anything fancier, you should check out mikeal's request module.

Install

npm install needle

Usage

var needle = require('needle');

needle.get('http://www.google.com', function(error, response, body){
  console.log("Got status code: " + response.statusCode);
});

Methods

needle.get(url, [options], callback);
needle.head(url, [options], callback);
needle.post(url, data, [options], callback);
needle.put(url, data, [options], callback);
needle.delete(url, data, [options], callback);

// and a generic one
needle.request(method, url, data, [options], callback);

Callback receives (error, response, body). Needle returns the response stream, which means you can pipe it to your heart's content.

needle.get('google.com/images/logo.png').pipe(fs.createWriteStream('logo.png'));

For more examples, scroll down exactly seven turns of your mousewheel. Perhaps eight.

Request options

• timeout : Returns error if no response received in X milisecs. Defaults to 10000 (10 secs). 0 means no timeout.
• follow : Number of redirects to follow. false means don't follow any (default), true means 10.
• multipart : Enables multipart/form-data encoding. Defaults to false.
• proxy : Forwards request through HTTP(s) proxy. Eg. proxy: 'http://proxy.server.com:3128'
• agent : Uses an http.Agent of your choice, instead of the global (default) one.
• headers : Object containing custom HTTP headers for request. Overrides defaults described below.
• auth : Determines what to do with provided username/password. Options are auto, digest or basic (default).
• json : When true, sets content type to application/json and sends request body as JSON string, instead of a query string.

Response options

• decode : Whether to decode response to UTF-8 if Content-Type charset is different. Defaults to true.
• parse : Whether to parse XML or JSON response bodies automagically. Defaults to true.
• output : Dump response output to file. When response is text, this occurs after parsing/decoding is done.

Note: To stay light on dependencies, Needle doesn't include the xml2js module used for XML parsing. To enable it, simply do npm install xml2js.

HTTP Header options

These are basically shortcuts to the headers option described above.

• compressed: If true, sets 'Accept-Encoding' header to 'gzip,deflate', and inflates content if zipped. Defaults to false.
• username : For HTTP basic auth.
• password : For HTTP basic auth. Requires username to be passed, obviously.
• accept : Sets 'Accept' HTTP header. Defaults to */*.
• connection: Sets 'Connection' HTTP header. Defaults to close.
• user_agent: Sets the 'User-Agent' HTTP header. Defaults to Needle/{version} (Node.js {node_version}).

Node.js TLS Options

These options are passed directly to https.request if present. Taken from the original documentation:

• pfx: Certificate, Private key and CA certificates to use for SSL.
• key: Private key to use for SSL.
• passphrase: A string of passphrase for the private key or pfx.
• cert: Public x509 certificate to use.
• ca: An authority certificate or array of authority certificates to check the remote host against.
• ciphers: A string describing the ciphers to use or exclude.
• rejectUnauthorized: If true, the server certificate is verified against the list of supplied CAs. An 'error' event is emitted if verification fails. Verification happens at the connection level, before the HTTP request is sent.
• secureProtocol: The SSL method to use, e.g. SSLv3_method to force SSL version 3.

Examples

GET with querystring

needle.get('http://www.google.com/search?q=syd+barrett', function(err, resp, body){
  if (!err && resp.statusCode == 200)
    console.log(body); // prints HTML
});

HTTPS GET with Basic Auth

needle.get('https://api.server.com', { username: 'you', password: 'secret' },
  function(err, resp, body){
    // used HTTP auth
});

Digest Auth

needle.get('other.server.com', { username: 'you', password: 'secret', auth: 'digest' },
  // needle prepends 'http://' to your URL, if missing
});

Custom headers, deflate

var options = {
  compressed : true,       // request a deflated response
  parse      : true,       // parse JSON
  headers    : {
    'X-Custom-Header': "Bumbaway atuna"
  }
}

needle.get('http://server.com/posts.json', options, function(err, resp, body){
  // body will contain a JSON.parse(d) object
  // if parsing fails, you'll simply get the original body
});

GET XML object

needle.get('https://news.ycombinator.com/rss', function(err, resp, body){
  // if xml2js is installed, you'll get a nice object containing the nodes in the RSS
});

GET binary, output to file

needle.get('http://upload.server.com/tux.png', { output: '/tmp/tux.png' }, function(err, resp, body){
  // you can dump any response to a file, not only binaries.
});

GET through proxy

needle.get('http://search.npmjs.org', { proxy: 'http://localhost:1234' }, function(err, resp, body){
  // request passed through proxy
});

Simple POST

needle.post('https://my.app.com/endpoint', 'foo=bar', function(err, resp, body){
  // you can pass params as a string or as an object
});

PUT with data object

var nested = {
  params: {
    are: {
      also: 'supported'
    }
  }
}

needle.put('https://api.app.com/v2', nested, function(err, resp, body){
  // if you don't pass any data, needle will throw an exception.
});

File upload using multipart, passing file path

var data = {
  foo: 'bar',
  image: { file: '/home/tomas/linux.png', content_type: 'image/png' }
}

needle.post('http://my.other.app.com', data, { multipart: true }, function(err, resp, body){
  // needle will read the file and include it in the form-data as binary
});

Multipart POST, passing data buffer

var buffer = fs.readFileSync('/path/to/package.zip');

var data = {
  zip_file: {
    buffer       : buffer,
    filename     : 'mypackage.zip',
    content_type : 'application/octet-stream'
  },
}

needle.post('http://somewhere.com/over/the/rainbow', data, { multipart: true }, function(err, resp, body){
  // if you see, when using buffers we need to pass the filename for the multipart body.
  // you can also pass a filename when using the file path method, in case you want to override
  // the default filename to be received on the other end.
});

Multipart with custom Content-Type

var data = {
  token: 'verysecret',
  payload: {
    value: JSON.stringify({ title: 'test', version: 1 }),
    content_type: 'application/json'
  }
}

needle.post('http://test.com/', data, { timeout: 5000, multipart: true }, function(err, resp, body){
  // in this case, if the request takes more than 5 seconds
  // the callback will return a [Socket closed] error
});

Credits

Written by Tomás Pollak, with the help of contributors.

Copyright

(c) 2013 Fork Ltd. Licensed under the MIT license.