Express Plugins

First, we will start off with parsing a POST requests body. If you are familiar with Express v3.x you with know about body-parser in Express v4.x has been replaced with urlencoded, here's how to use it:

app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

This will parse the POST request and add the data to your request object's .body property.

If your data is in a JSON format you will need to add another built-in function to parse it like below.

app.use(express.json());

If you want to serve static files like HTML documents, CSS, JS, or Media files you will need to use the .static adapter with the directory you want to pull from as the first argument.

app.use(express.static('public'));

Those are the most important built-in functions to know how to use, however, there are a few that don't come along with express but are helpful to know how to use.

CORS

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing or CORS is the way you can share resources from different websites. This data is set in the Head of the HTTP request to automatically do this Express has the cors module.

Installation

npm i cors

Usage

const cors = require("cors");
app.use(cors());

GZIP

If you want to compress your data before sending it to the client Express has the compression module that auto-compresses all out bound data.

Installation

npm i compression

Usage

app.use(compression());