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http - Node documentation

Usage in Deno

import * as mod from "node:http";

To use the HTTP server and client one must import the node:http module.

The HTTP interfaces in Node.js are designed to support many features of the protocol which have been traditionally difficult to use. In particular, large, possibly chunk-encoded, messages. The interface is careful to never buffer entire requests or responses, so the user is able to stream data.

HTTP message headers are represented by an object like this:

{ "content-length": "123",
  "content-type": "text/plain",
  "connection": "keep-alive",
  "host": "example.com",
  "accept": "*" }

Keys are lowercased. Values are not modified.

In order to support the full spectrum of possible HTTP applications, the Node.js HTTP API is very low-level. It deals with stream handling and message parsing only. It parses a message into headers and body but it does not parse the actual headers or the body.

See message.headers for details on how duplicate headers are handled.

The raw headers as they were received are retained in the rawHeaders property, which is an array of [key, value, key2, value2, ...]. For example, the previous message header object might have a rawHeaders list like the following:

[ 'ConTent-Length', '123456',
  'content-LENGTH', '123',
  'content-type', 'text/plain',
  'CONNECTION', 'keep-alive',
  'Host', 'example.com',
  'accepT', '*' ]

Classes

c
Agent

An Agent is responsible for managing connection persistenceand reuse for HTTP clients. It maintains a queue of pending requestsfor a given host and port, reusing a single socket connection for eachuntil the queue is empty, at which time the socket is either destroyedor put into a pool where it is kept to be used again for requests to thesame host and port. Whether it is destroyed or pooled depends on the keepAlive option.

c
ClientRequest

This object is created internally and returned from request. Itrepresents an in-progress request whose header has already been queued. Theheader is still mutable using the setHeader(name, value), getHeader(name), removeHeader(name) API. The actual header willbe sent along with the first data chunk or when calling request.end().

c
IncomingMessage

An IncomingMessage object is created by Server or ClientRequest and passed as the first argument to the 'request' and 'response' event respectively. It may be used toaccess responsestatus, headers, and data.

c
ServerResponse

This object is created internally by an HTTP server, not by the user. It ispassed as the second parameter to the 'request' event.

Functions

f
createServer

Returns a new instance of Server.

f
get

Since most requests are GET requests without bodies, Node.js provides thisconvenience method. The only difference between this method and request is that it sets the method to GET by default and calls req.end() automatically. The callback must take care toconsume the responsedata for reasons stated in ClientRequest section.

f
request

options in socket.connect() are also supported.

f
setMaxIdleHTTPParsers

Set the maximum number of idle HTTP parsers.

f
validateHeaderName

Performs the low-level validations on the provided name that are done when res.setHeader(name, value) is called.

f
validateHeaderValue

Performs the low-level validations on the provided value that are done when res.setHeader(name, value) is called.

Interfaces

I
RequestOptions
No documentation available

Type Aliases

T
OutgoingHttpHeader
No documentation available
T
RequestListener
No documentation available

Variables

v
CloseEvent
No documentation available
v
globalAgent

Global instance of Agent which is used as the default for all HTTP clientrequests. Diverges from a default Agent configuration by having keepAliveenabled and a timeout of 5 seconds.

v
maxHeaderSize

Read-only property specifying the maximum allowed size of HTTP headers in bytes.Defaults to 16KB. Configurable using the --max-http-header-size CLI option.

v
MessageEvent
No documentation available
v
METHODS
No documentation available
v
STATUS_CODES
No documentation available
v
WebSocket

A browser-compatible implementation of WebSocket.