Concept illustrations for express.js and axios
This note is about an exercise of using express.js and axios. First, I create a simple express server, and secondly, I use axios to make http call to the server created.
Express server #
The following is the code for our little express server.
// require the express
const express = require('express')
// create a express instance
const app = express()
// specify the port we want to listen to
const port = 3000
// define a data for illustration purpose
const mydata = {a:1,b:2,c:3}
app.get('/', (req, res)) => res.json(mydata)
app.listen(port, () => console.log(`Example app listening on port ${port}!`))
Save the above code to file myexpress-server.js. Now if you run node myexpress-server.js in your terminal and open http://localhost:3000 in your browser, you should see the values of mydata printed on the screen!. Now we have successfully set up a small express server!
Use axios to make http call #
Now we want to acquire our mydata from some external place, we can use axios to make API call to our express server built and get our mydata object. Let’s write our axios code,
// require axios
const axios = require('axios')
// define our axios.get function
const getData = async () => {
try {
const mydata = await axios.get('http://localhost:3000')
console.log(mydata.data)
} catch (error) {
console.error(error)
}
}
// call our function
getData()
Save the following code to a file named myaxios.js. Now if we a) start our express server by doing node myexpress-server.js in the terminal, and b) run our axios code in another terminal window using node myaxios.js. Whola, you can see the data for our mydata object printed on the terminal!.