Handle GET and POST Requests with Express.js

Before we can understand how Express handles GET and POST requests, it’s essential to understand these types of requests.

• GET requests are used to retrieve or get the information from the given server using a URL. Requests using GET should only retrieve data and should have no other effect on the data. Any changes in the data should be done using the POST request only.

• POST requests are used to send data to the server, usually to create a resource, such as customer information, file upload, or confidential data. In other words, we use POST when we want to submit data to the server, which needs to be processed by a specific resource or to create a new resource. This resource creation could involve tasks like adding a new database record or uploading files to the server.

Let’s now learn how each of these requests is handled by Express.

Handle GET requests

To handle GET requests, there’s a method provided by Express, get(), that accepts all the GET requests for a specified route. The method accepts two parameters:

• path: This parameter specifies the route to which the request needs to be sent.

• callback: This parameter is a callback function that’s executed when a request is routed to the specified path. The callback function contains the logic that needs to be executed for the path.

The get() method can accept any number of callback functions to be executed one after the other in a sequence. Let’s now see a real example to help us understand it.