Abstract proxy implementation

[kevva]

Wouldn't it be good to abstract your proxy implementation into a separate module that people can make use of? Currently proxies is kind of a no man's land but with this module it just seems to work.

Sure, one could use request for everything but this module is pretty big and includes a lot of features which in many cases aren't needed.

[simov]

Good point, although I think this should be refactored as part of the future request's plugin system (whatever that will be at the end), not exactly as a stand alone module in that sense.

[nylen]

Currently proxies is kind of a no man's land but with this module it just seems to work.

I'm really glad to read that :)

---

I'm not sure how much of this you already know, but there are two ways to ask a web server to proxy somewhere, rather than the regular GET / HTTP/1.1 request:

# Ask the server to retrieve the page for us
GET http://destination.com:port/path HTTP/1.1

# Ask the server to tunnel to the destination for us
CONNECT destination.com:port HTTP/1.1
# then, over the connection to the destination server:
GET /path HTTP/1.1

The first way is pretty simple (but not secure for HTTPS destinations), we just set the path option here and pass it to http[s].request here.

The second way is mostly handled by mikeal/tunnel-agent which we depend on.

---

In the future, I envision there being a request-base module containing the basic functionality and perhaps a couple of other tightly coupled things like streaming, and then request would take request-base and add in the standard feature modules like request-auth and perhaps request-proxy. So users would be able to compose their own set of features if they want something simpler.

Want to help us get there?

[kevva]

Yeah, I'm currently using the first way (somewhat) here. The reason I'm asking is because we need some reliable proxy support in got.

As for the future, yes, request would benefit greatly from being a bit more modular and make use of plugins. My biggest pain point with this is the loading time when requiring it. I'll help if I can find some time to read the code etc.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[reconbot]

Request is now in maintenance mode and wont be merging any new features. Please see #3142 for more information.