Dead-simple Echo Webserver - expects, returns JSON

app.js

var express = require('express'),
bodyParser = require('body-parser'),
util = require('util')
;

var app = express();

app.use(bodyParser());

app.get('/', function(req, res){
  res.send('You probably want to perform an HTTP POST');
});

app.post('/', function(req, res){
	util.log("body: "+util.inspect(req.body, false, 99));
  res.json(req.body);
});

app.listen(3000);

To run this simple server you should have node.js installed.

The easiest way to run it is to put save app.js to a file in a clean directory. Open a terminal and change directories to your new clean directory and run these commands:

npm install express
npm install body-parser
npm install jade

Once you've got those dependencies in place run:

node app.js

After the server is running you can send it a post using curl, or any other mechanism that can post JSON.

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"nothing":"interesting","posted":"here"}' http://localhost:3000/

The sole purpose of this simple server was to sanity check my answer to this question on stack-overflow.