Fastify Multipart File Upload

by Manuel Spigolon

How to work with files with Fastify? It is so easy thanks to the fastify-multipart plugin!

There is one concept to keep in mind: someone must consume the uploaded file. The consumer could be:

• Your implementation
• The plugin itself calling the toBuffer() method

The part object

The multipart content type may contain a file or simple form-data. In fastify-multipart there are two types of "part" ether.

The file object has these fields:

• data.file // a stream object
• data.fieldname
• data.filename
• data.encoding
• data.mimetype
• data.toBuffer() // a promise that return a Buffer with the stream content

The string type has just:

• data.value // returns the string content
• data.toBuffer() // a promise that return a Buffer with the value content

How to upload a single file

This implementation works for small and HUGE files:

const fs = require('fs')
const pump = require('pump')
const Fastify = require('fastify')
const fastifyMultipart = require('fastify-multipart')

const fastify = Fastify({ logger: true })

fastify.register(fastifyMultipart)

fastify.post('/', async function (req, reply) {
  // return the first file submitted, regardless the field name
  const data = await req.file()

  // we must consume the file
  // we use pump to manage correctly the streams and wait till the end of the pipe
  const storedFile = fs.createWriteStream('./img-uploaded.png')
  await pump(data.file, storedFile)

  return { upload: 'completed' }
})

How to upload multiple files

When your server receives multiple files you need to ask all the files in the request and process them (sequentially in this example):

fastify.post('/multiple', async function (req, reply) {
  // get all the files in the request payload
  // `const files` is an async generator
  const files = await req.files()

  for await (const part of files) { // iterate the async generator
    req.log.info('storing %s', part.filename)
    const storedFile = fs.createWriteStream(`./${part.filename}`)
    await pump(part.file, storedFile)
  }

  return { upload: 'completed' }
})

Managing small files

An easier way to access the files, if they are small, is to attach them to the body and call toBuffer(). This will cause all the files to be loaded in memory, so you must be sure the files will not be HUGE; otherwise, an out-of-memory could happen.

const fastify = Fastify({ logger: true })
fastify.register(fastifyMultipart, { attachFieldsToBody: true })

fastify.post('/body', async function (req, reply) {
  // The `fooFile` and `barFile` are the field name of the uploaded file
 return {
    upload: {
      astring: req.body.aField.value,
      foo: await req.body.fooFile.toBuffer(),
      bar: await req.body.barFile.toBuffer()
    }
  }
})

End

Now, I hope I have been teaching you about multipart with Fastify! For more Fastify content, follow me on Twitter!

Write comments here below or open an issue on GitHub for any questions or feedback! Thank you for reading!