Response

The res object represents the HTTP response that an Minimaal app sends when it gets an HTTP request.

In this documentation and by convention, the object is always referred to as res (and the HTTP request is req) but its actual name is determined by the parameters to the callback function in which you’re working.

For example:

app.js

app.get("/user/:id", (req, res) => {
  res.send(`user ${req.params.id}`);
});

But you could just as well have:

app.js

app.get("/user/:id", (request, response) => {
  response.send(`user ${request.params.id}`);
});

The res object is an enhanced version of Node’s own response object and supports all built-in fields and methods.

Properties

res.json([body])

Sends a JSON response. This method sends a response (with the correct content-type) that is the parameter converted to a JSON string using JSON.stringify().

The parameter can be any JSON type, including object, array, string, Boolean, number, or null, and you can also use it to convert other values to JSON.

app.js

res.json(null);
res.json({ user: "tobi" });
res.status(500).json({ error: "message" });

res.send([body])

Sends the HTTP response.

The body parameter can be a Buffer object, a String, an object, Boolean, or an Array. For example:

app.js

res.send(Buffer.from("whoop"));
res.send({ some: "json" });
res.send("<p>some html</p>");
res.status(404).send("Sorry, we cannot find that!");
res.status(500).send({ error: "something blew up" });

When the parameter is a String, the method sets the Content-Type to “text/html”:

app.js

res.send("<p>some html</p>");

When the parameter is an Array or Object, Minimaal responds with the JSON representation:

app.js

res.send({ user: "tobi" });
res.send([1, 2, 3]);

res.status(code)

Sets the HTTP status for the response. It is a chainable alias of Node’s response.statusCode.

app.js

res.status(400).send("Bad Request");

Request