Axios post request body is just an empty object on the server side (React - Axios - Node.js - Express)

Question

I was trying to send a post request to my server and was using this:

let dataToReturn = {
      method: "POST",
      url: "http://localhost:9000/logData",
      headers: { "testing" : "IT WORKED" },
      body: {"hola" : 'testing to see if this counts'}
    }

axios(dataToReturn) 

It know it would send. I checked the network tab in inspector and could see that it was sent, and could do req.headers on the server and it would print out the headers. But whenever I tried to log req.body on the server it would just print out '{}'

  var body = {
      firstName: 'testName',
      lastName: 'testLastName'
  };

  axios.post('http://localhost:9000/logData', body)
    .then(function (response) {
      console.log(response);
    })
    .catch(function (error) {
      console.log(error);
    });

This works tho ^^ and successfully prints out the body when I do 'req.body' Why does the top example log an empty object?

Here's what the route looked like on the server side

app.post('/logData', function(req, res) {
    console.log('recieved post');
    console.log(req.body);
    res.sendStatus(200);
})

I acknowledge that I'm a noob and this might be a dumb question, so please excuse my ignorance. Also happy to post more info if you need it.

Answer 1

You need to add content type in the header of your request.change your header as mentioned below

headers: { "testing" : "IT WORKED","Content-Type":"application/json" },