Sending data through POST request from a node.js server to a node.js server

Posting data is a matter of sending a query string (just like the way you would send it with an URL after the ?) as the request body.

This requires Content-Type and Content-Length headers, so the receiving server knows how to interpret the incoming data. ^(*)

var querystring = require('querystring');
var http = require('http');

var data = querystring.stringify({
      username: yourUsernameValue,
      password: yourPasswordValue
    });

var options = {
    host: 'my.url',
    port: 80,
    path: '/login',
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
        'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(data)
    }
};

var req = http.request(options, function(res) {
    res.setEncoding('utf8');
    res.on('data', function (chunk) {
        console.log("body: " + chunk);
    });
});

req.write(data);
req.end();

^(*) Sending data requires the Content-Type header to be set correctly, i.e. application/x-www-form-urlencoded for the traditional format that a standard HTML form would use.

It's easy to send JSON (application/json) in exactly the same manner; just JSON.stringify() the data beforehand.

URL-encoded data supports one level of structure (i.e. key and value). JSON is useful when it comes to exchanging data that has a nested structure.

The bottom line is: The server must be able to interpret the content type in question. It could be text/plain or anything else; there is no need to convert data if the receiving server understands it as it is.

Add a charset parameter (e.g. application/json; charset=Windows-1252) if your data is in an unusual character set, i.e. not UTF-8. This can be necessary if you read it from a file, for example.

You can also use Requestify, a really cool and very simple HTTP client I wrote for nodeJS + it supports caching.

Just do the following for executing a POST request:

var requestify = require('requestify');

requestify.post('http://example.com', {
    hello: 'world'
})
.then(function(response) {
    // Get the response body (JSON parsed or jQuery object for XMLs)
    response.getBody();
});