Device Detective

Device Detective is an ExpressJS-compatible Node.js module, which determines whether a user agent is a phone, tablet, desktop, text browser, or web crawler, in accordance with MDN recommendations for detecting mobiles.

{
  desktop: {Boolean},
  crawler: {Boolean},
  tablet:  {Boolean},
  mobile:  {Boolean},
  phone:   {Boolean},
  lynx:    {Boolean}
}

Install it.

npm install device-detective

Use it.

As a middleware:

// EXAMPLE APP.JS -------------------------------------------
var deviceDetective = require('device-detective')

app.use(deviceDetective)

Now examine res.userAgentInfo in any request handler.

Or as a simple function call:

// EXAMPLE ROUTE FILE ---------------------------------------
var deviceDetective = require('device-detective')

var device = deviceDetective.detect(req)

Things to be aware of:

Desktop is default.

If detect doesn't encounter anything to identify the user agent, it'll set desktop to true and the rest to false. This may seem foolish, given that mobile devices will soon produce more web traffic than desktops (if they don't already), but setting mobile to true by default would lead request handlers to elide content when the user agent is a web crawler that can't be identified.

Phone/tablet entails mobile.

If Device Detective sets either the phone or tablet properties to true, it'll also set mobile to true. You're free to treat phones and tablets alike without checking both.