http

An object which contains arrays of sockets currently awaiting use by the agent when keepAlive is enabled. Do not modify.

Sockets in the freeSockets list will be automatically destroyed and removed from the array on 'timeout'.

By default set to 256. For agents with keepAlive enabled, this sets the maximum number of sockets that will be left open in the free state.

By default set to Infinity. Determines how many concurrent sockets the agent can have open per origin. Origin is the returned value of agent.getName().

By default set to Infinity. Determines how many concurrent sockets the agent can have open. Unlike maxSockets, this parameter applies across all origins.

An object which contains queues of requests that have not yet been assigned to sockets. Do not modify.

An object which contains arrays of sockets currently in use by the agent. Do not modify.

Destroy any sockets that are currently in use by the agent.

It is usually not necessary to do this. However, if using an agent with keepAlive enabled, then it is best to explicitly shut down the agent when it is no longer needed. Otherwise, sockets might stay open for quite a long time before the server terminates them.

The request.aborted property will be true if the request has been aborted.

The request host.

Limits maximum response headers count. If set to 0, no limit will be applied.

The request method.

The request path.

The request protocol.

When sending request through a keep-alive enabled agent, the underlying socket might be reused. But if server closes connection at unfortunate time, client may run into a 'ECONNRESET' error.

import http from 'node:http';

// Server has a 5 seconds keep-alive timeout by default
http
  .createServer((req, res) => {
    res.write('hello\n');
    res.end();
  })
  .listen(3000);

setInterval(() => {
  // Adapting a keep-alive agent
  http.get('http://localhost:3000', { agent }, (res) => {
    res.on('data', (data) => {
      // Do nothing
    });
  });
}, 5000); // Sending request on 5s interval so it's easy to hit idle timeout

By marking a request whether it reused socket or not, we can do automatic error retry base on it.

import http from 'node:http';
const agent = new http.Agent({ keepAlive: true });

function retriableRequest() {
  const req = http
    .get('http://localhost:3000', { agent }, (res) => {
      // ...
    })
    .on('error', (err) => {
      // Check if retry is needed
      if (req.reusedSocket && err.code === 'ECONNRESET') {
        retriableRequest();
      }
    });
}

retriableRequest();

Marks the request as aborting. Calling this will cause remaining data in the response to be dropped and the socket to be destroyed.

Returns an array containing the unique names of the current outgoing raw headers. Header names are returned with their exact casing being set.

request.setHeader('Foo', 'bar');
request.setHeader('Set-Cookie', ['foo=bar', 'bar=baz']);

const headerNames = request.getRawHeaderNames();
// headerNames === ['Foo', 'Set-Cookie']

Once a socket is assigned to this request and is connected socket.setNoDelay() will be called.

Once a socket is assigned to this request and is connected socket.setKeepAlive() will be called.

Once a socket is assigned to this request and is connected socket.setTimeout() will be called.

The message.aborted property will be true if the request has been aborted.

The message.complete property will be true if a complete HTTP message has been received and successfully parsed.

This property is particularly useful as a means of determining if a client or server fully transmitted a message before a connection was terminated:

const req = http.request({
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 8080,
  method: 'POST',
}, (res) => {
  res.resume();
  res.on('end', () => {
    if (!res.complete)
      console.error(
        'The connection was terminated while the message was still being sent');
  });
});

Alias for message.socket.

The request/response headers object.

Key-value pairs of header names and values. Header names are lower-cased.

// Prints something like:
//
// { 'user-agent': 'curl/7.22.0',
//   host: '127.0.0.1:8000',
//   accept: '*' }
console.log(request.headers);

Duplicates in raw headers are handled in the following ways, depending on the header name:

• Duplicates of age, authorization, content-length, content-type, etag, expires, from, host, if-modified-since, if-unmodified-since, last-modified, location, max-forwards, proxy-authorization, referer, retry-after, server, or user-agent are discarded. To allow duplicate values of the headers listed above to be joined, use the option joinDuplicateHeaders in request and createServer. See RFC 9110 Section 5.3 for more information.
• set-cookie is always an array. Duplicates are added to the array.
• For duplicate cookie headers, the values are joined together with ; .
• For all other headers, the values are joined together with , .

Similar to message.headers, but there is no join logic and the values are always arrays of strings, even for headers received just once.

// Prints something like:
//
// { 'user-agent': ['curl/7.22.0'],
//   host: ['127.0.0.1:8000'],
//   accept: ['*'] }
console.log(request.headersDistinct);

In case of server request, the HTTP version sent by the client. In the case of client response, the HTTP version of the connected-to server. Probably either '1.1' or '1.0'.

Also message.httpVersionMajor is the first integer and message.httpVersionMinor is the second.

Only valid for request obtained from Server.

The request method as a string. Read only. Examples: 'GET', 'DELETE'.

The raw request/response headers list exactly as they were received.

The keys and values are in the same list. It is not a list of tuples. So, the even-numbered offsets are key values, and the odd-numbered offsets are the associated values.

Header names are not lowercased, and duplicates are not merged.

// Prints something like:
//
// [ 'user-agent',
//   'this is invalid because there can be only one',
//   'User-Agent',
//   'curl/7.22.0',
//   'Host',
//   '127.0.0.1:8000',
//   'ACCEPT',
//   '*' ]
console.log(request.rawHeaders);

The raw request/response trailer keys and values exactly as they were received. Only populated at the 'end' event.

The net.Socket object associated with the connection.

With HTTPS support, use request.socket.getPeerCertificate() to obtain the client's authentication details.

This property is guaranteed to be an instance of the net.Socket class, a subclass of stream.Duplex, unless the user specified a socket type other than net.Socket or internally nulled.

Only valid for response obtained from ClientRequest.

The 3-digit HTTP response status code. E.G. 404.

Only valid for response obtained from ClientRequest.

The HTTP response status message (reason phrase). E.G. OK or Internal Server Error.

The request/response trailers object. Only populated at the 'end' event.

Similar to message.trailers, but there is no join logic and the values are always arrays of strings, even for headers received just once. Only populated at the 'end' event.

Only valid for request obtained from Server.

Request URL string. This contains only the URL that is present in the actual HTTP request. Take the following request:

GET /status?name=ryan HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/plain

To parse the URL into its parts:

new URL(`http://${process.env.HOST ?? 'localhost'}${request.url}`);

When request.url is '/status?name=ryan' and process.env.HOST is undefined:

$ node
> new URL(`http://${process.env.HOST ?? 'localhost'}${request.url}`);
URL {
  href: 'http://localhost/status?name=ryan',
  origin: 'http://localhost',
  protocol: 'http:',
  username: '',
  password: '',
  host: 'localhost',
  hostname: 'localhost',
  port: '',
  pathname: '/status',
  search: '?name=ryan',
  searchParams: URLSearchParams { 'name' => 'ryan' },
  hash: ''
}

Ensure that you set process.env.HOST to the server's host name, or consider replacing this part entirely. If using req.headers.host, ensure proper validation is used, as clients may specify a custom Host header.

Calls destroy() on the socket that received the IncomingMessage. If error is provided, an 'error' event is emitted on the socket and error is passed as an argument to any listeners on the event.

Calls message.socket.setTimeout(msecs, callback).

Alias of outgoingMessage.socket.

Read-only. true if the headers were sent, otherwise false.

Reference to the underlying socket. Usually, users will not want to access this property.

After calling outgoingMessage.end(), this property will be nulled.

Adds HTTP trailers (headers but at the end of the message) to the message.

Trailers will only be emitted if the message is chunked encoded. If not, the trailers will be silently discarded.

HTTP requires the Trailer header to be sent to emit trailers, with a list of header field names in its value, e.g.

message.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain',
                         'Trailer': 'Content-MD5' });
message.write(fileData);
message.addTrailers({ 'Content-MD5': '7895bf4b8828b55ceaf47747b4bca667' });
message.end();

Attempting to set a header field name or value that contains invalid characters will result in a TypeError being thrown.

Append a single header value to the header object.

If the value is an array, this is equivalent to calling this method multiple times.

If there were no previous values for the header, this is equivalent to calling outgoingMessage.setHeader(name, value).

Depending of the value of options.uniqueHeaders when the client request or the server were created, this will end up in the header being sent multiple times or a single time with values joined using ; .

Flushes the message headers.

For efficiency reason, Node.js normally buffers the message headers until outgoingMessage.end() is called or the first chunk of message data is written. It then tries to pack the headers and data into a single TCP packet.

It is usually desired (it saves a TCP round-trip), but not when the first data is not sent until possibly much later. outgoingMessage.flushHeaders() bypasses the optimization and kickstarts the message.

Gets the value of the HTTP header with the given name. If that header is not set, the returned value will be undefined.

Returns an array containing the unique names of the current outgoing headers. All names are lowercase.

Returns a shallow copy of the current outgoing headers. Since a shallow copy is used, array values may be mutated without additional calls to various header-related HTTP module methods. The keys of the returned object are the header names and the values are the respective header values. All header names are lowercase.

The object returned by the outgoingMessage.getHeaders() method does not prototypically inherit from the JavaScript Object. This means that typical Object methods such as obj.toString(), obj.hasOwnProperty(), and others are not defined and will not work.

outgoingMessage.setHeader('Foo', 'bar');
outgoingMessage.setHeader('Set-Cookie', ['foo=bar', 'bar=baz']);

const headers = outgoingMessage.getHeaders();
// headers === { foo: 'bar', 'set-cookie': ['foo=bar', 'bar=baz'] }

Returns true if the header identified by name is currently set in the outgoing headers. The header name is case-insensitive.

const hasContentType = outgoingMessage.hasHeader('content-type');

Removes a header that is queued for implicit sending.

outgoingMessage.removeHeader('Content-Encoding');

Sets a single header value. If the header already exists in the to-be-sent headers, its value will be replaced. Use an array of strings to send multiple headers with the same name.

Sets multiple header values for implicit headers. headers must be an instance of Headers or Map, if a header already exists in the to-be-sent headers, its value will be replaced.

const headers = new Headers({ foo: 'bar' });
outgoingMessage.setHeaders(headers);

or

const headers = new Map([['foo', 'bar']]);
outgoingMessage.setHeaders(headers);

When headers have been set with outgoingMessage.setHeaders(), they will be merged with any headers passed to response.writeHead(), with the headers passed to response.writeHead() given precedence.

// Returns content-type = text/plain
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  const headers = new Headers({ 'Content-Type': 'text/html' });
  res.setHeaders(headers);
  res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
  res.end('ok');
});

Once a socket is associated with the message and is connected, socket.setTimeout() will be called with msecs as the first parameter.

Limit the amount of time the parser will wait to receive the complete HTTP headers.

If the timeout expires, the server responds with status 408 without forwarding the request to the request listener and then closes the connection.

It must be set to a non-zero value (e.g. 120 seconds) to protect against potential Denial-of-Service attacks in case the server is deployed without a reverse proxy in front.

The number of milliseconds of inactivity a server needs to wait for additional incoming data, after it has finished writing the last response, before a socket will be destroyed. If the server receives new data before the keep-alive timeout has fired, it will reset the regular inactivity timeout, i.e., server.timeout.

A value of 0 will disable the keep-alive timeout behavior on incoming connections. A value of 0 makes the http server behave similarly to Node.js versions prior to 8.0.0, which did not have a keep-alive timeout.

The socket timeout logic is set up on connection, so changing this value only affects new connections to the server, not any existing connections.

Limits maximum incoming headers count. If set to 0, no limit will be applied.

The maximum number of requests socket can handle before closing keep alive connection.

A value of 0 will disable the limit.

When the limit is reached it will set the Connection header value to close, but will not actually close the connection, subsequent requests sent after the limit is reached will get 503 Service Unavailable as a response.

Sets the timeout value in milliseconds for receiving the entire request from the client.

If the timeout expires, the server responds with status 408 without forwarding the request to the request listener and then closes the connection.

It must be set to a non-zero value (e.g. 120 seconds) to protect against potential Denial-of-Service attacks in case the server is deployed without a reverse proxy in front.

The number of milliseconds of inactivity before a socket is presumed to have timed out.

A value of 0 will disable the timeout behavior on incoming connections.

The socket timeout logic is set up on connection, so changing this value only affects new connections to the server, not any existing connections.

Closes all connections connected to this server.

Closes all connections connected to this server which are not sending a request or waiting for a response.

Sets the timeout value for sockets, and emits a 'timeout' event on the Server object, passing the socket as an argument, if a timeout occurs.

If there is a 'timeout' event listener on the Server object, then it will be called with the timed-out socket as an argument.

By default, the Server does not timeout sockets. However, if a callback is assigned to the Server's 'timeout' event, timeouts must be handled explicitly.

When using implicit headers (not calling response.writeHead() explicitly), this property controls the status code that will be sent to the client when the headers get flushed.

response.statusCode = 404;

After response header was sent to the client, this property indicates the status code which was sent out.

When using implicit headers (not calling response.writeHead() explicitly), this property controls the status message that will be sent to the client when the headers get flushed. If this is left as undefined then the standard message for the status code will be used.

response.statusMessage = 'Not found';

After response header was sent to the client, this property indicates the status message which was sent out.

If set to true, Node.js will check whether the Content-Length header value and the size of the body, in bytes, are equal. Mismatching the Content-Length header value will result in an Error being thrown, identified by code:``'ERR_HTTP_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH'.

Sends an HTTP/1.1 100 Continue message to the client, indicating that the request body should be sent. See the 'checkContinue' event on Server.

Sends an HTTP/1.1 103 Early Hints message to the client with a Link header, indicating that the user agent can preload/preconnect the linked resources. The hints is an object containing the values of headers to be sent with early hints message. The optional callback argument will be called when the response message has been written.

Example

const earlyHintsLink = '</styles.css>; rel=preload; as=style';
response.writeEarlyHints({
  'link': earlyHintsLink,
});

const earlyHintsLinks = [
  '</styles.css>; rel=preload; as=style',
  '</scripts.js>; rel=preload; as=script',
];
response.writeEarlyHints({
  'link': earlyHintsLinks,
  'x-trace-id': 'id for diagnostics',
});

const earlyHintsCallback = () => console.log('early hints message sent');
response.writeEarlyHints({
  'link': earlyHintsLinks,
}, earlyHintsCallback);

Sends a response header to the request. The status code is a 3-digit HTTP status code, like 404. The last argument, headers, are the response headers. Optionally one can give a human-readable statusMessage as the second argument.

headers may be an Array where the keys and values are in the same list. It is not a list of tuples. So, the even-numbered offsets are key values, and the odd-numbered offsets are the associated values. The array is in the same format as request.rawHeaders.

Returns a reference to the ServerResponse, so that calls can be chained.

const body = 'hello world';
response
  .writeHead(200, {
    'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(body),
    'Content-Type': 'text/plain',
  })
  .end(body);

This method must only be called once on a message and it must be called before response.end() is called.

If response.write() or response.end() are called before calling this, the implicit/mutable headers will be calculated and call this function.

When headers have been set with response.setHeader(), they will be merged with any headers passed to response.writeHead(), with the headers passed to response.writeHead() given precedence.

If this method is called and response.setHeader() has not been called, it will directly write the supplied header values onto the network channel without caching internally, and the response.getHeader() on the header will not yield the expected result. If progressive population of headers is desired with potential future retrieval and modification, use response.setHeader() instead.

// Returns content-type = text/plain
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html');
  res.setHeader('X-Foo', 'bar');
  res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
  res.end('ok');
});

Content-Length is read in bytes, not characters. Use Buffer.byteLength() to determine the length of the body in bytes. Node.js will check whether Content-Length and the length of the body which has been transmitted are equal or not.

Attempting to set a header field name or value that contains invalid characters will result in a [Error][] being thrown.

Sends a HTTP/1.1 102 Processing message to the client, indicating that the request body should be sent.