How to upload file using multer or body-parser

Question

I am a NodeJS beginner, following along a book \"Web Development with MongoDB and NodeJS\". I am stuck at its chapter 6 with \'multer\'. When I use multer for file uploads t

Answer 1

multer() returns a middleware generator that uses the settings you specified, so you cannot pass its return value directly to app.use(). You can see all of the types of middleware it can generate in the documentation, but typically the generated middleware are added at the route level instead of globally like the other body parsers. This is because you will typically pass in the name of the file field(s) that you will be expecting.

For example, this will accept a single file (along with any non-file fields) whose form field name is foo:

var upload = multer({
  dest: path.join(__dirname, '../public/upload/temp')
});

// ...

app.post('/upload', upload.single('foo'), function(req, res) {
  if (req.file) {
    console.dir(req.file);
    return res.end('Thank you for the file');
  }
  res.end('Missing file');
});

Also, body-parser does not currently export a multipart/form-data-capable middleware, so you cannot use that module for handling uploaded files (well, short of passing a base64-encoded string in an application/x-www-form-urlencoded form or something, but that's much less efficient).