Parsing JSON Bodies

Parsing JSON Bodies

By default, Express does not parse the request body. To read JSON sent by a client, you must apply the built-in express.json() middleware. Once applied, the parsed object is available on req.body.

import express from "express";

const app = express();

// Apply BEFORE your route handlers
app.use(express.json());

app.post("/echo", (req, res) => {
  // req.body is now a JS object
  res.json(req.body);
});

Express also ships with express.urlencoded({ extended: true }) for parsing HTML form submissions, and you can add multer for multipart/form-data (file uploads).