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Building Full-Stack Web Applications With Node.js and React

Upload Files

Understand how to build a file upload system in a Node.js Express backend using Multer middleware. Learn to configure storage for files, save metadata in MongoDB, and secure uploads with authentication. Explore how to test upload functionality using Postman to manage files effectively in your application.

We'll cover the following...

Our application’s business logic mainly depends on uploading files because we’re building an application that we can treat as though it were our own private library. Uploading files allows us to extend the application’s functionality as much as we want. We can use that functionality to manipulate our files and organize them.

Prerequisites

We’ll use Multer, a well-known npm package, which is used as middleware for uploading files. To configure uploading files to our server, we need to install the following:

  • The multer handles files that are uploading to the server.
  • The body-parser parses Multer’s middleware into the request body.

Let’s configure the body-parser in index.js.

Javascript (babel-node)
// backend/index.js
// ... rest of the code
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
// ... rest of the code
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
app.use(bodyParser.json());
// ... rest of the code

Static assets

We won’t store the actual files in the database because that would downgrade the performance of the queries. Instead, we store the files in the server disk storage or any other disk storage. The database stores a reference ...