Using formidable to handle file uploads
Uploading a file to the web is a common activity, be it an image, a video, or a document. Files require different handling compared to simple POST data. Browsers embed files being uploaded into multipart messages.
Multipart messages allow multiple pieces of content to be combined into one payload. To handle multipart messages, we need to use a multipart parser.
In this recipe, we will use the formidable module as our multipart parser to handle file uploads.
Getting ready
- First, let's create a new folder called
file-uploadand create aserver.jsfile:$ mkdir file-upload $ cd file-upload $ touch server.js
- As we will be using an
npmmodule for this recipe, we need to initialize our project:$ npm init --yes
- We will also need to create two subdirectories—one named
publicto store our HTML form, and another nameduploadsto store our uploaded files:$ mkdir public $ mkdir uploads