Middleware

What is middleware?

  • Anything that terminates the req, res cycle counts as middleware. It is basically anything that acts as an intermediary once the request is received but before the resource is sent. A good example would be the app.use(express.json() or app.use(bodyParser.json) functions we call in order to be able to parse JSON that is sent from the client.
  • You will most likely have multiple middleware functions running at once. We call this intermediary part of the cycle the request processing pipeline.
  • Generally all middleware will be added as a property on the Express app instance with the app.use(...) syntax.

Creating custom middleware functions

Basic schema

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  // do some middleware
  next();
});

next

The next parameter is key, it allows Express to move onto the next middleware function once the custom middleware executes. Without it, the request processing pipeline will get blocked.

Middleware functions are basically asynchronous requests and as such they use a similar syntax as Promises (e.g then) for sequencing processes.

Example of sequence

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  console.log("Do process A...");
  next();
});

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  console.log("Do process B...");
  next();
});

It makes more sense of course to define our middleware within a function and then pass it as an argument to app.use()

Including middleware based on environment

With a full-scale Node application you will typically run three environments:

  • Development
  • Testing
  • Production

We will not want to run certain types of middleware in all environments. For example, it would be costly to run logging in the app’s production environment. It would make more sense to run this only in development.

Accessing current Node environment

We can control which middleware we run via the Node envrionment variables: process.env (see for instance ports).

We could set Morgan to run only in development with:

if (app.get("env") === "development") {
  app.use(morgan("common"));
  console.log("Morgan enabled");
}
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