Request body is empty when making a POST request via HTML form

Question

I'm having a problem with symptoms similar to this question and several others, though the answers haven't helped me. I'm trying to submit a password via a simple HTML form to a Node app, but the request body keeps coming back empty.

Server:

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: true}));

router.post('/login', (req, res) => {
  console.log(req.body);
  console.log(req.headers['content-type']);
});

Form:

<form action="/login" method="post">
  <input type="password" id="password">
  <button type="submit">Log In</button>
</form>

If I submit the form, I get the following:

{} // req.body
'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' // req.headers['content-type']

However, if I try to curl the endpoint, I get a non-empty req.body:

$ curl -X POST localhost:5000/login -d 'password=testpw'

// Output
{ password: 'testpw' }
'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'

What am I doing wrong?

score 31 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 08 '17 at 09:46

31

Problem is in your form

<form action="/login" method="post">
  <input type="password" id="password">
  <button type="submit">Log In</button>
</form>

Your input doesn't have a name element

Should be

<input name="password" type="password" id="password">

answered Jan 08 '17 at 09:46

Alex

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3

Ughhhhhhhhh. Thanks. – ericgio Jan 08 '17 at 09:51
1

This might be trivial, but it saved me. Thanks :) – Tore Binarflame May 03 '21 at 14:02
Hi there. I have the same problem, but in my case, I have the name, I have an id for each input, I used express.json() as body parser and still get the body empy. Any leads you can give me? – Alexandru DuDu Apr 02 '22 at 21:46

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 19 '21 at 23:53

If your form is properly setup as shown in the accepted answer, but your request body is still empty on your backend, you should check to make sure your backend is using some sort of body parser. If you are using express.js, an example fix is to simply add:

const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({limit: '5000mb', extended: true, parameterLimit: 100000000000}));

Request body is empty when making a POST request via HTML form

2 Answers2

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