Express Responses

Express Responses attaches methods to res to make returning HTTP errors easier and more consistent.

npm install express-responses

var app = require('express')();
var responses = require('express-responses');

app.use(responses({
    view: 'http-error',
    emit: function(error) {...}
}));

app.get('/users/:user', function(req, res, next) {
    var user = db.getUser(req.params.user);
    if(!user) {
        // returns a 404 along with the error message
        res.notFound('User '+req.params.user+' not found.');
    } else {
        res.locals.user = user;
        res.render('user/show');
    }
});

app.get('/feature', function(req, res, next) {
  res.notImplemented({
    message: "This feature has not been implemented.",
    documentationUrl: "http://api.example.com/docs/..."
  });
});

Not every single HTTP code is attached to res, see the source for which methods are included.

Options

view String

If the view option is set with a template name, Responses will respond to a request with res.render([view]) if the request accepts (is expecting) HTML. In the template, Responses will expose an http object in res.locals containing an object like the following:

{
    "code": 404,
    "status": "not found",
    "message": "User chris not found."
}

If the request does not accept HTML or view is not set, Responses will return this object via res.json(data). In either case, res.status will be appropriately called.

emit Function

If the emit option is set with a function accepting an Error, any errors sent with Responses will also be passed to the function. This is useful for debugging and logging.

Only errors with status codes 500 and above will be passed to emit when process.env.NODE_ENV = 'production' as 5xx series errors are the fault of the server. In development, any error will be emitted to the emit function.

Contributing

Obviously, there are a lot more HTTP error codes. I have only implemented the ones I have been using daily. If you can justify the use case for new methods, open an issue or pull request (new methods are really just one liners).

We can always have more tests: if you find a bug, create an issue or be fabulous and fix the problem and write the tests up yourself in a coherent pull request.

Run tests with the npm test command.

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