#simple-node-http

Simple wrapper around node.js http to make basic requests easier and add promises API.

Most of the time when using native node.js http to make a request, I would end up with the same code:

Native node.js http post request:

var options = {
	hostname: 'some-url.com',
	port: 3000,
	path: 'some/path.json',
	method: 'POST',
	headers: {
		'a': 'b',
		'c': 'd'
	}
};
var postData = "some data in whatever form you want...";
var processResponse = function(res) {
	var body = "";
	res.on('data', function(chunk) {
		body += chunk.toString();
	});
	res.on('end', function() {
		var responseBody = JSON.parse(responseBody);
		handleResponse(responseBody);
	});
};
var req = http.request(options, processResponse)
			  .on('error', handleError);
req.write(body);
req.end();

This is a lot of boilerplate for something so simple!
I wanted to just write a line or two and handle anything with Promises rather than callbacks!
I have made the wrapper as simple as I could, it still uses the same structure for options as the native implementation of http request, but automaticaly puts the body together from chunks and parses it to JSON if that's the response content-type. It also returns a promise rather than taking/calling callbacks.

The same code with simple-node-http:

var simpleHttp = require('simple-node-http');
var options = {
	hostname: 'some-url.com',
	port: 3000,
	path: 'some/path.json',
	method: 'POST',
	headers: {
		'a': 'b',
		'c': 'd'
	}
};
var postData = "some data in whatever form you want...";
simpleHttp(options, postData)
	.then(handleResponse)
	.catch(handleError);

As you can see the setup is exactly the same, but the logic of making the request and handling response/error is greatly simplified.
postData is optional and can be omitted if no data is to be written to the request body.
I am aware this is not suitable for every single scenario, bot it will for majority of simple requests.