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Tips: How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express

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In one application I’m building, I had this problem.

Using Express, I can import body-parser to parse the body as JSON:

import bodyParser from 'body-parser'
app.use(bodyParser.json())

However, to integrate with the Stripe payments API I needed to expose the raw body (unparsed) to an endpoint, and I couldn’t figure out how to do that while still parsing the body as JSON.

This did the trick:

app.use(bodyParser.json({
  verify: (req, res, buf) => {
    req.rawBody = buf
  }
}))

Now the raw body is available on req.rawBody and the JSON parsed data is available on req.body.

From the body-parser GitHub I found that this doubles the RAM usage for every request, but since I need this functionality, I have no other choice.

Except perhaps creating a different server just for the Stripe webhook I wanted to handle.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: Axios crashes the Node.js process when the request fails
2: How to set up a cron job that runs a Node.js app
3: ▶︎ How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express
4: Interact with the Google Analytics API using Node.js
5: How to bulk convert file names using Node.js
6: How to deep copy JavaScript objects using structuredClone
7: How to handle file uploads in Node.js
8: How to send an email using nodemailer
9: Logging all the requests coming through an Express app
10: How to upload an image to S3 using Node.js
11: How to read a CSV file with Node.js
12: How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program
13: How to upload files to S3 from Node.js
14: How to write a CSV file with Node.js
15: Where to host a Node.js app
16: Parsing JSON with Node.js
17: nodemailer, how to embed an image into an email
18: The Pug Guide
19: Restarting a Node process without file changes
20: How to use Sequelize to interact with PostgreSQL