File uploading with Express 4.0: req.files undefined

Question

I\'m attempting to get a simple file upload mechanism working with Express 4.0 but I keep getting undefined for req.files in the app.post

Answer 1

It looks like body-parser did support uploading files in Express 3, but support was dropped for Express 4 when it no longer included Connect as a dependency

After looking through some of the modules in mscdex's answer, I found that express-busboy was a far better alternative and the closest thing to a drop-in replacement. The only differences I noticed were in the properties of the uploaded file.

console.log(req.files) using body-parser (Express 3) output an object that looked like this:

{ file: 
   { fieldName: 'file',
     originalFilename: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     name: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg'
     path: 'uploads/6323-16v7rc.jpg',
     type: 'image/jpeg',
     headers: 
      { 'content-disposition': 'form-data; name="file"; filename="360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg"',
        'content-type': 'image/jpeg' },
     ws: 
      WriteStream { /* ... */ },
     size: 48614 } }

compared to console.log(req.files) using express-busboy (Express 4):

{ file: 
   { field: 'file',
     filename: '360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     file: 'uploads/9749a8b6-f9cc-40a9-86f1-337a46e16e44/file/360px-Cute_Monkey_cropped.jpg',
     mimetype: 'image/jpeg',
     encoding: '7bit',
     truncated: false
     uuid: '9749a8b6-f9cc-40a9-86f1-337a46e16e44' } }