Using Node as an HTTP client

The HTTP object doesn't just provide server capabilities, it also affords us with client functionality. We might want to use this functionality for a myriad of purposes: HTTP-based API's (such as a REST-based interface), website scraping for statistical processing or in the absence of an API, or the first step in automated UI testing. In this task, we're going to use http.get with process to fetch external web pages dynamically via the command line.

Getting ready

We are not creating a server. So in the name of convention, we should use a different name for our new file. Let's call it fetch.js.

How to do it...

The http.request method allows us to make requests of any kind (for example, GET, POST, DELETE, OPTION, and so on), but for GET requests, we can use the shorthand http.get method as shown in the following code:

var http = require('http');
var urlOpts = {host: 'www.nodejs.org', path: '/', port: '80'};
http.get(urlOpts, function (response) {
  response.on('data...