Dillion Megida I'm a frontend engineer and technical writer based in Nigeria.

Multer: Easily upload files with Node.js and Express

6 min read 1911

Node Multer Express Upload Files

Editor’s note: This article was last updated 24 March 2022 to reflect updates to Node.js and the body-parser library.

Multer is a Node.js middleware for handling multipart/form-data that makes the otherwise painstaking process of uploading files in Node.js much easier. In this article, we’ll learn the purpose of Multer in handling files in submitted forms. We’ll also explore Multer by building a mini app with a frontend and backend to test uploading a file. Let’s get started!

Table of contents

Managing user inputs in forms

Web applications receive all different types of input from users, including text, graphical controls like checkboxes or radio buttons, and files, like images, videos, and other media.

In forms, each of these inputs are submitted to a server that processes the inputs, uses them in some way, perhaps saving them somewhere else, then gives the frontend a success or failed response.

When submitting forms that contain text inputs, the server, Node.js in our case, has less work to do. Using Express, you can easily grab all the inputs entered in the req.body object. However, submitting forms with files is a bit more complex because they require more processing, which is where Multer comes in.

Encoding and uploading forms with Multer

All forms include an enctype attribute, which specifies how data should be encoded by the browser before sending it to the server. The default value is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, which supports alphanumeric data. The other encoding type is multipart/form-data, which involves uploading files through forms.

There are two ways to upload forms with multipart/form-data encoding. The first is by using the enctype attribute:

<form action='/upload_files' enctype='multipart/form-data'>
...
</form>

The code above sends the form-data to the /upload_files path of your application. The second is by using the FormData API. The FormData API allows us to build a multipart/form-data form with key-value pairs that can be sent to the server. Here’s how it’s used:

const form = new FormData()
form.append('name', "Dillion")
form.append('image', <a file>)

On sending such forms, it becomes the server’s responsibility to correctly parse the form and execute the final operation on the data.

Multer: an overview

Multer is a middleware designed to handle multipart/form-data in forms. It is similar to the popular Node.js body-parser, which is built into Express middleware for form submissions. But, Multer differs in that it supports multipart data, only processing multipart/form-data forms.

Multer does the work of body-parser by attaching the values of text fields in the req.body object. Multer also creates a new object for multiple files, either req.file or req.files, which holds information about those files. From the file object, you can pick whatever information is required to post the file to a media management API, like Cloudinary.

Now that we understand the importance of Multer, we’ll build a small sample app to show how a frontend app can send three different files at once in a form, and how Multer is able to process the files on the backend, making them available for further use.

Building an app with Multer support

We’ll start by building the frontend using vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Of course, you can easily use any framework to follow along.

Creating our frontend

First, create a folder called file-upload-example, then create another folder called frontend inside. In the frontend folder, we’ll have three standard files, index.html, styles.css, and script.js:

&lt;!-- index.html -->
<body>
    <div class="container">
        <h1>File Upload</h1>
        <form id='form'>
            <div class="input-group">
                <label for='name'>Your name</label>
                <input name='name' id='name' placeholder="Enter your name" />
            </div>
            <div class="input-group">
                <label for='files'>Select files</label>
                <input id='files' type="file" multiple>
            </div>
            <button class="submit-btn" type='submit'>Upload</button>
        </form>
    </div>
    <script src='./script.js'></script>
</body>

Notice that we’ve created a label and input for Your Name as well as Select Files. We also added an Upload button.

Next, we’ll add the CSS for styling:

/* style.css */
body {
    background-color: rgb(6, 26, 27);
}
* {
    box-sizing: border-box;
}
.container {
    max-width: 500px;
    margin: 60px auto;
}
.container h1 {
    text-align: center;
    color: white;
}
form {
    background-color: white;
    padding: 30px;
}
form .input-group {
    margin-bottom: 15px;
}
form label {
    display: block;
    margin-bottom: 10px;
}
form input {
    padding: 12px 20px;
    width: 100%;
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
}
.submit-btn {
    width: 100%;
    border: none;
    background: rgb(37, 83, 3);
    font-size: 18px;
    color: white;
    border-radius: 3px;
    padding: 20px;
    text-align: center;
}

Below is a screenshot of the webpage so far:

Create Frontend Screenshot Multer
File upload webpage screenshot with CSS

As you can see, the form we created takes two inputs, name and files. The multiple attribute specified in the files input enables us to select multiple files.

Next, we’ll send the form to the server using the code below:

// script.js
const form = document.getElementById("form");

form.addEventListener("submit", submitForm);

function submitForm(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    const name = document.getElementById("name");
    const files = document.getElementById("files");
    const formData = new FormData();
    formData.append("name", name.value);
    for(let i =0; i < files.files.length; i++) {
            formData.append("files", files.files[i]);
    }
    fetch("http://localhost:5000/upload_files", {
        method: 'POST',
        body: formData,
        headers: {
          "Content-Type": "multipart/form-data"
        }
    })
        .then((res) => console.log(res))
        .catch((err) => ("Error occured", err));
}

There are several important things that must happen when we use script.js. First, we get the form element from the DOM and add a submit event to it. Upon submitting, we use preventDefaultto prevent the default action that the browser would take when a form is submitted, which would normally be redirecting to the value of the action attribute. Next, we get the name and files input element from the DOM and createformData.

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From here, we’ll append the value of the name input using a key of name to the formData. Then, we dynamically add the multiple files we selected to the formData using a key of files.

Note: if we’re only concerned with a single file, we can append files.files[0].

Finally, we’ll add a POST request to http://localhost:5000/upload_files, which is the API on the backend that we’ll build in the next section.

Setting up the server

For our demo, we’ll build our backend using Node.js and Express. We’ll set up a simple API in upload_files and start our server on localhost:5000. The API will receive a POST request that contains the inputs from the submitted form.

To use Node.js for our server, we’ll need to set up a basic Node.js project. In the root directory of the project in the terminal at file-upload-example, run the following code:

npm init -y

The command above creates a basic package.json with some information about your app. Next, we’ll install the required dependency, which for our purposes is Express:

npm i express

Next, create a server.js file and add the following code:

// server.js
const express = require("express");

const app = express();
app.use(express.json());
app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

app.post("/upload_files", uploadFiles);
function uploadFiles(req, res) {
    console.log(req.body);
}
app.listen(5000, () => {
    console.log(`Server started...`);
});

Express contains the bodyParser object, which is a middleware for populating req.body with the submitted inputs on a form. Calling app.use(express.json()) executes the middleware on every request made to our server.

The API is set up with app.post('/upload_files', uploadFiles).  uploadFiles is the API controller. As seen above, we are only logging out req.body, which should be populated by epxress.json(). We’ll test this out in the example below.

Running body-parser in Express

In your terminal, run node server to start the server. If done correctly, you’ll see the following in your terminal:

Run Body Parser Express
Run Node server output start server

You can now open your frontend app in your browser. Fill in both inputs in the frontend, the name and files, then click submit. On your backend, you should see the following:

Backend Body Parser Express
Backend visual name and file inputs

The code in the image above means that the req.body object is empty, which is to be expected. If you’ll recall, body-parser doesn’t support multipart data. Instead, we’ll use Multer to parse the form.

Install and configure Multer

Install Multer by running the following command in your terminal:

npm i multer

To configure Multer, add the following to the top of server.js:

const multer = require("multer");
const upload = multer({ dest: "uploads/" });
...

Although Multer has many other configuration options, we’re only interested in the dest property for our project, which specifies the directory where Multer will save the encoded files.

Next, we’ll use Multer to intercept incoming requests on our API and parse the inputs to make them available on the req object:

app.post("/upload_files", upload.array("files"), uploadFiles);

function uploadFiles(req, res) {
    console.log(req.body);
    console.log(req.files);
    res.json({ message: "Successfully uploaded files" });
}

To handle multiple files, use upload.array. For a single file, use upload.single. Note that the files argument depends on the name of the input specified in formData.

Multer will add the text inputs to req.body and add the files sent to the req.files array. To see this at work in the terminal, enter text and select multiple images on the frontend, then submit and check the logged results in your terminal.

As you can see in the example below, I entered Images in the text input and selected a PDF, an SVG, and a JPEG file. Below is a screenshot of the logged result:

Logged Results Multer Installation
Logged results screenshot images text input

For reference, if you want to upload to a storage service like Cloudinary, you will have have to send the file directly from the uploads folder. The path property shows the path to the file.

Conclusion

For text inputs alone, the bodyParser object used inside of Express is enough to parse those inputs. They make the inputs available as a key value pair in the req.body object. Multer comes in handy when forms contain multipart data that includes text inputs and files, which the body-parser library cannot handle.

With Multer, you can handle single or multiple files in addition to text inputs sent through a form. Remember that you should only use Multer when you’re sending files through forms, because Multer cannot handle any form that isn’t multipart.

In this article, we’ve seen a brief of form submissions, the benefits of body parsers on the server and the role that Multer plays in handling form inputs. We also built a small application using Node.js and Multer to see a file upload process.

For the next steps, you can look at uploading to Cloudinary from your server using the Upload API Reference. I hope you enjoyed this article! Happy coding!

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Dillion Megida I'm a frontend engineer and technical writer based in Nigeria.
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3 Replies to “Multer: Easily upload files with Node.js and Express”

  1. Using this tutorial, I am seeing that my images files are correctly coming through in the request body within an array “images” (created on front end with each file from the file input’s filelist). However, Multer is returning an empty array for within req.files

  2. You must remove the “Content-Type” header or else the request fails with a 500. And you have to have the response body without a comma at the end:
    {
    method: ‘POST’,
    body: formData
    }

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