[Fixed] Proxy with express.js

Issue

To avoid same-domain AJAX issues, I want my node.js web server to forward all requests from URL /api/BLABLA to another server, for example other_domain.com:3000/BLABLA, and return to user the same thing that this remote server returned, transparently.

All other URLs (beside /api/*) are to be served directly, no proxying.

How do I achieve this with node.js + express.js? Can you give a simple code example?

(both the web server and the remote 3000 server are under my control, both running node.js with express.js)

---

So far I found this https://github.com/http-party/node-http-proxy , but reading the documentation there didn’t make me any wiser. I ended up with

var proxy = new httpProxy.RoutingProxy();
app.all("/api/*", function(req, res) {
    console.log("old request url " + req.url)
    req.url = '/' + req.url.split('/').slice(2).join('/'); // remove the '/api' part
    console.log("new request url " + req.url)
    proxy.proxyRequest(req, res, {
        host: "other_domain.com",
        port: 3000
    });
});

but nothing is returned to the original web server (or to the end user), so no luck.

Solution

You want to use http.request to create a similar request to the remote API and return its response.

Something like this:

const http = require('http');
// or use import http from 'http';


/* your app config here */

app.post('/api/BLABLA', (oreq, ores) => {
  const options = {
    // host to forward to
    host: 'www.google.com',
    // port to forward to
    port: 80,
    // path to forward to
    path: '/api/BLABLA',
    // request method
    method: 'POST',
    // headers to send
    headers: oreq.headers,
  };

  const creq = http
    .request(options, pres => {
      // set encoding
      pres.setEncoding('utf8');

      // set http status code based on proxied response
      ores.writeHead(pres.statusCode);

      // wait for data
      pres.on('data', chunk => {
        ores.write(chunk);
      });

      pres.on('close', () => {
        // closed, let's end client request as well
        ores.end();
      });

      pres.on('end', () => {
        // finished, let's finish client request as well
        ores.end();
      });
    })
    .on('error', e => {
      // we got an error
      console.log(e.message);
      try {
        // attempt to set error message and http status
        ores.writeHead(500);
        ores.write(e.message);
      } catch (e) {
        // ignore
      }
      ores.end();
    });

  creq.end();
});

Notice: I haven’t really tried the above, so it might contain parse errors hopefully this will give you a hint as to how to get it to work.