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NodeJS SuperAgent: How to Send POST Requests

How to Send POST Requests With NodeJS SuperAgent

SuperAgent allows you to configure an http request parameters such as url, body and headers by chaining various methods.

To send POST requests with SuperAgent, first create a new post request by calling request.post method with url as an argument. Then set the post body by using send method of the request. To configure a request header, just chain set method with previous call to send method and provide the header name (Content-Type) and value (application/json):

const request = require("superagent");

const url = 'https://httpbin.org/post';
const body = { key: 'value' };

request.post(url)
  .send(body)
  .set('Content-Type', 'application/json')
  .then(response => {
    console.log(response.body);
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
  });

In this guide for The NodeJs Web Scraping Playbook, we will look at how to make POST requests with the NodeJS SuperAgent.

In this guide we will walk you through the most common ways of sending POST requests with NodeJS SuperAgent:

Let's begin...

POST JSON Data Using NodeJS SuperAgent​

A common scenario for using POST requests is to send JSON data to an API endpoint, etc. Making POST requests this with NodeJS SuperAgent is very simple.

You simply just need to call request.post method with url and follow that with a call to send method prividing the request body as an argument:


const request = require("superagent");

const url = 'https://httpbin.org/post';
const body = { key: 'value' };

request.post(url)
  .send(body)
  .set('Content-Type', 'application/json')
  .then(response => {
    console.log(response.body);
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
  });

POST Form Data Using NodeJS SuperAgent​

Another common use case for using POST requests is to send form data to an endpoint.

To make form data POST requests with SuperAgent we simply need to set the data to the request by calling the send method:


const querystring = require('querystring');
const request = require("superagent");

const url = 'https://httpbin.org/post';
const data = { key: 'value' }
const body = querystring.stringify(data);

request.post(url)
  .send(body)
  .set('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded')
  .then(response => {
    console.log(response.body)
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
  });

Here we set the Content-Type header to application/x-www-form-urlencoded so that the body will be picked up as form data. Also note that we have set body to a string representation of data calculated using querystring.stringify function.

More Web Scraping Tutorials​

So that's how you can send POST requests using NodeJs SuperAgent.

If you would like to learn more about Web Scraping, then be sure to check out The Web Scraping Playbook.

Or check out one of our more in-depth guides: