How to override node.js http to use a proxy for all outbound requests

Question

I recently created a node.js app that reaches out to social media sites and caches our public feeds. I'm using some existing npm modules to facilitate accessing the social media api's. It works like a charm in my dev environment but on our production environment requests are timing out because they need to go through a proxy.

Without having to modify the npm modules how can I make the outbound requests go through a proxy?

Answer 1

Use the http.globalAgent property. This will let you intercept all requests running in your process. You can then modify those requests to be properly formatted for the proxy server.

http://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_http_globalagent

Another option is to create a proxy exception for that application.

Answer 2

There is an npm module for that:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/global-tunnel

var globalTunnel = require('global-tunnel');

globalTunnel.initialize({
  host: '10.0.0.10',
  port: 8080,
  sockets: 50 // optional pool size for each http and https 
});

Or if you only want to proxy certain requests, you can use the tunnel package (which is the driving force behind the global tunnel above):

https://www.npmjs.com/package/tunnel

var tunnel = require('tunnel');

// create the agent
var tunnelingAgent = tunnel.httpsOverHttps({
  proxy: {
    host: 'localhost',
    port: 3128
  }
});

var req = https.request({
  host: 'example.com',
  port: 443,
  // pass the agent in your request options
  agent: tunnelingAgent
});