Book Image

Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js

By : Jason Krol
Book Image

Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js

By: Jason Krol

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
12
Popular Node.js Web Frameworks
Index

Consuming external APIs from Node.js


There will undoubtedly be a time when you want to consume an API directly from within your Node.js code. Perhaps, your own API endpoint needs to first fetch data from some other unrelated third-party API before sending a response. Whatever the reason, the act of sending a request to an external API endpoint and receiving a response can be done fairly easily using a popular and well-known npm module called Request. Request was written by Mikeal Rogers and is currently the third most popular (and most relied upon) npm module after async and underscore.

Request is basically a super simple HTTP client, so everything you've been doing with Postman REST Client so far is basically what Request can do, only the resulting data is available to you in your node code as well as the response status codes and/or errors, if any.

Consuming an API endpoint using Request

Let's do a neat trick and actually consume our own endpoint as if it was some third-party external API...