 <p>So this problem arose because of inexperience with the express module.</p> <p>I thought bodyParsed would hold a value returned from: app.use(bodyParser.json());</p> <p>when you use app.use(bodyParser.json()); It actually stores it in the body property of the Request. </p> <p>So:</p> <pre><code>app.use(bodyParser.json(joptions));//causes request.body to populate with the JSON data app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true })); // for parsing application/x-www-form-urlencoded requires multer app.all('/*', function(request, response){ //Handle request var bucket = request; console.log('\n \n \n &amp;&amp;&amp;&amp;&amp;&amp; \n \n \n'); var joptions = { type: 'application/json' } console.log(request.body)); var headParsed = parseHttpHeader(bucket.headers['content-type'])[0]; console.log(headParsed); }); </code></pre> <p>Not sure if this forces all requests to be parsed as application/json. Maybe moving the bodyparser inside the app.all() will cause it to only parse when using that route?</p>