Last Updated: 3/9/2026
Sending HTTP requests
Overview
You can use the global $http.send(config) helper to send HTTP requests to external services.
This could be used for example to retrieve data from external data sources, to make custom requests to a payment provider API, etc.
Below is a list with all currently supported config options and their defaults.
// throws on timeout or network connectivity error const res = $http.send({ url: "", method: "GET", body: "", // ex. JSON.stringify({"test": 123}) or new FormData() headers: {}, // ex. {"content-type": "application/json"} timeout: 120, // in seconds }) console.log(res.headers) // the response headers (ex. res.headers['X-Custom'][0]) console.log(res.cookies) // the response cookies (ex. res.cookies.sessionId.value) console.log(res.statusCode) // the response HTTP status code console.log(res.body) // the response body as plain bytes array console.log(res.json) // the response body as parsed json array or map
Here is an example that will enrich a single book record with some data based on its ISBN details from openlibrary.org.
onRecordCreateRequest((e) => { let isbn = e.record.get("isbn"); // try to update with the published date from the openlibrary API try { const res = $http.send({ url: "https://openlibrary.org/isbn/" + isbn + ".json", headers: {"content-type": "application/json"} }) if (res.statusCode == 200) { e.record.set("published", res.json.publish_date) } } catch (err) { e.app.logger().error("Failed to retrieve book data", "error", err); } return e.next() }, "books")
multipart/form-data requests
In order to send multipart/form-data requests (ex. uploading files) the request
body must be a FormData instance.
PocketBase JSVM’s FormData has the same APIs as its
browser equivalent
with the main difference that for file values instead of Blob it accepts
$filesystem.File.
const formData = new FormData(); formData.append("title", "Hello world!") formData.append("documents", $filesystem.fileFromBytes("doc1", "doc1.txt")) formData.append("documents", $filesystem.fileFromBytes("doc2", "doc2.txt")) const res = $http.send({ url: "https://...", method: "POST", body: formData, }) console.log(res.statusCode)
Limitations
As of now there is no support for streamed responses or server-sent events (SSE). The
$http.send call blocks and returns the entire response body at once.
For this and other more advanced use cases you’ll have to extend PocketBase with Go.