Express Request

A sugar layer on top of http.IncomingMessage. Provides a higher level abstraction for interacting with http requests.

History and Reasoning

One of Node's biggest failures is not having better req/res interfaces as part of the platform.

– @ianstormtaylor

The Node core implementation of an http request is purposly slim. In the early days of the platform this led to the success of a more high level api which was built into Express. Today, in 2019, Express is still the most popular http framework but there is more depth to developers choices today.

Due to the popularity of Express, many compatibility layers have been introduced in platforms and frameworks.

Found another example of Node's lack of good req and res causing complexity... Google Cloud has to expose "Express-compatible" objects (a) for the simple convenience methods and (b) so their users can use all the packages that are tightly coupled to Express in the ecosystem.

– @ianstormtaylor

Well Ian kept tweeting about it, so I started the effort to extract the Express request. The goal of this is to start the process from today's world where there are many competing implementations with little shared implementation, to one where frameworks and shared componentry are usable across ecosystems.

The shared interface can both be a contract between http framework ecosystems, as well as a proving ground for future additions to node core. It can be a place for us all to collaborate on improvements and advancements.

Usage

$ npm install --save @express/request

const http = require('http')
const Request = require('@express/request')

http.createServer(function (origReq, res) {
  const req = Request(origReq)

  // Now we have the express style request
  // with all of the sugar methods.
  // See the express docs for details
  console.log(req.hostname, req.ip)
}).listen()

You can optionally extend or override the prototype to use by passing it as the second parameter:

const http = require('http')
const Request = require('@express/request')

// Extend from our existing request proto
const NewReqProto = Object.create(Request.reqProto)

// Add Our custom method
NewReqProto.httpDescription = function () {
  return this.method.toUpperCase() + ' ' + this.path
}

http.createServer(function (origReq, res) {
  const req = Request(origReq, NewReqProto)
  // GET /foo prints "GET /foo"
  console.log(req.httpDescription())
}).listen()