How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express

Find out how to get both parsed body and raw body in Express with `body-parser`

In one application I’m building, I had this problem.

Using Express, I can import body-parser to parse the body as JSON:

import bodyParser from 'body-parser'

app.use(bodyParser.json())

However to integrate with the Stripe payments API I had the need to expose the raw body (not parsed) into an endpoint, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it, while still parsing the body as JSON.

This did the trick:

app.use(bodyParser.json({
  verify: (req, res, buf) => {
    req.rawBody = buf
  }
}))

Now the raw body is available on req.rawBody and the JSON parsed data is available on req.body.

From the body-parser GitHub I found that this doubles the RAM usage for every request, but since I need this functionality, I have no other way.

Except perhaps creating a different server just for the Stripe webhook I wanted to handle.