HTTP request

Node Documentation

Sends HTTP requests and returns the response.

Inputs

url string: If not configured in the node, this optional property sets the url of the request.
method string: If not configured in the node, this optional property sets the HTTP method of the request. Must be one of GET, PUT, POST, PATCH or DELETE.
headers object: Sets the HTTP headers of the request. NOTE: Any headers set in the node configuration will overwrite any matching headers in msg.headers
cookies object: If set, can be used to send cookies with the request.
payload: Sent as the body of the request.
rejectUnauthorized: If set to false, allows requests to be made to https sites that use self signed certificates.
followRedirects: If set to false prevent following Redirect (HTTP 301).true by default
requestTimeout: If set to a positive number of milliseconds, will override the globally set httpRequestTimeout parameter.

Outputs

payload string | object | buffer: The body of the response. The node can be configured to return the body as a string, attempt to parse it as a JSON string or leave it as a binary buffer.
statusCode number: The status code of the response, or the error code if the request could not be completed.
headers object: An object containing the response headers.
responseUrl string: In case any redirects occurred while processing the request, this property is the final redirected url. Otherwise, the url of the original request.
responseCookies object: If the response includes cookies, this property is an object of name/value pairs for each cookie.
redirectList array: If the request was redirected one or more times, the accumulated information will be added to this property. `location` is the next redirect destination. `cookies` is the cookies returned from the redirect source.

Details

When configured within the node, the URL property can contain mustache-style tags. These allow the url to be constructed using values of the incoming message. For example, if the url is set to example.com/{{{topic}}}, it will have the value of msg.topic automatically inserted. Using {{{...}}} prevents mustache from escaping characters like / & etc.

The node can optionally automatically encode msg.payload as query string parameters for a GET request, in which case msg.payload has to be an object.

Note: If running behind a proxy, the standard http_proxy=... environment variable should be set and Node-RED restarted, or use Proxy Configuration. If Proxy Configuration was set, the configuration take precedence over environment variable.

Using multiple HTTP Request nodes

In order to use more than one of these nodes in the same flow, care must be taken with the msg.headers property. The first node will set this property with the response headers. The next node will then use those headers for its request - this is not usually the right thing to do. If msg.headers property is left unchanged between nodes, it will be ignored by the second node. To set custom headers, msg.headers should first be deleted or reset to an empty object: {}.

Cookie handling

The cookies property passed to the node must be an object of name/value pairs. The value can be either a string to set the value of the cookie or it can be an object with a single value property.

Any cookies returned by the request are passed back under the responseCookies property.

Content type handling

If msg.payload is an Object, the node will automatically set the content type of the request to application/json and encode the body as such.

To encode the request as form data, msg.headers["content-type"] should be set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

File Upload

To perform a file upload, msg.headers["content-type"] should be set to multipart/form-data and the msg.payload passed to the node must be an object with the following structure:

{
    "KEY": {
        "value": FILE_CONTENTS,
        "options": {
            "filename": "FILENAME"
        }
    }
}

The values of KEY, FILE_CONTENTS and FILENAME should be set to the appropriate values.