Can't send HTTP POST with custom headers to external server

Question

I am currently working on an Alexa skill using AWS Lambda, and all has been working perfectly except for one thing. I can't seem to successfully POST HTTP param's / custom headers to my server. It can grab pull the information perfectly, but I cannot figure out why it is not sending the parameters / custom headers.

My code for sending a HTTP POST request looks like this :

function httpGetMall(latitude, longitude, callback) {

    var options = {
        host: 'myserver.com',
        path: '/path/to/script.php',
        auth: 'myAuthenticationPassword'.toString('base64'),
        method: 'POST', 
        headers: {'latitude': latitude.toString(), 'longitude': longitude.toString()}
    };

    var req = http.request(options, (res) => {

        var body = '';

        res.on('data', (d) => {
            body += d;
        });

        res.on('end', function () {
            callback(body);
        });

    });
    req.end();

    req.on('error', (e) => {

    });
}

I know for a fact the function is being called correctly, as it returns the data on callback perfectly.

On my php script, I am attempting to grab the values like so :

$latitude = $_POST['latitude'];
$longitude = $_POST['longitude'];

I have tried manually setting the latitude and longitude inside the function to see if they were not getting passed in, but the server still never received them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

POST data is not sent in headers. It is sent as an encoded string in the body. In your code, you would encode it properly and then send it with req.write() . There's a POST code example in the nodejs doc for http.request() .

Here's how you could modify your code to do it properly:

var querystring = require('querystring');

function httpGetMall(latitude, longitude, callback) {

    var options = {
        host: 'myserver.com',
        path: '/path/to/script.php',
        auth: 'myAuthenticationPassword'.toString('base64'),
        method: 'POST', 
    };

    var req = http.request(options, (res) => {

        var body = '';

        res.on('data', (d) => {
            body += d;
        });

        res.on('end', function () {
            callback(null, body);
        });

    });

    req.on('error', (e) => {
        callback(e);
    });

    // format the data appropriately for the POST body
    var postData = querystring.stringify({latitude: latitude, longitude: longitude});
    // write the POST body
    req.write(postData);
    req.end();
}

Note: You also need to add proper error handling. Probably you should make your callback into a typical nodejs async callback that takes an error as the first argument and data as the second. Then, you can just call callback(err) when you get an error and callback(null, body) when you get the response data. I've modified my answer to show this also.