No response using express proxy route

Question

I've written a small proxy with nodejs, express and htt-proxy. It works well for serving local files but fails when it comes to proxy to external api:

var express = require('express'),
    app = express.createServer(),
    httpProxy = require('http-proxy');


app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 1235);

var proxy = new httpProxy.RoutingProxy();

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
    res.sendfile(__dirname + '/index.html');
});
app.get('/js/*', function(req, res) {
    res.sendfile(__dirname + req.url);
});
app.get('/css/*', function(req, res) {
    res.sendfile(__dirname + req.url);
});

app.all('/*', function(req, res) {
    req.url = 'v1/public/yql?q=show%20tables&format=json&callback=';
    proxy.proxyRequest(req, res, {
        host: 'query.yahooapis.com', //yahoo is just an example to verify its not the apis fault
        port: 8080
    });

});

The problem is that there is no response from the yahoo api, maybe there is an response but i dont came up in the browser.

Answer 1

Even simpler with pipe and request -Package

var request = require('request');

app.use('/api', function(req, res) {
  var url = apiUrl + req.url;
  req.pipe(request(url)).pipe(res);
});

It pipes the whole request to the API and pipes the response back to the requestor. This also handles POST/PUT/DELETE and all other requests \\o/

If you also care about query string you should pipe it as well

req.pipe(request({ qs:req.query, uri: url })).pipe(res);

Answer 2

Maybe your code is different when you're testing, but I'm querying the same URL as in your code sample using the following:

http://query.yahooapis.com:8080/v1/public/yql?q=show%20tables&format=json&callback=

and I get nothing back. My guess is you want to change port to 80 (from 8080) -- it works when I change it like so:

http://query.yahooapis.com:80/v1/public/yql?q=show%20tables&format=json&callback=

So that means it should be:

proxy.proxyRequest(req, res, {
    host: 'query.yahooapis.com', //yahoo is just an example to verify its not the apis fault
    port: 80
});

Answer 3

Maybe I use http-proxy in a wrong way. Using restler does what I want:

var express = require('express'),
    app = express.createServer(),
    restler = require('restler');


app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.listen( 1234);



app.get('/', function(req, res) {
    console.log(__dirname + '/index.html')
    res.sendfile(__dirname + '/index.html');
});
app.get('/js/*', function(req, res) {
    res.sendfile(__dirname + req.url);
});
app.get('/css/*', function(req, res) {
    res.sendfile(__dirname + req.url);
});


app.all('/*', function(req, res) {

    restler.get('http://myUrl.com:80/app_test.php/api' + req.url, {

        }).on('complete', function (data) {
                console.log(data)
               res.json(data)
            });

});

Answer 4

I ended up using http-proxy-middleware .

The code looks something like this:

var express = require("express");
var proxy = require("http-proxy-middleware");

const theProxy = proxy({
  target: "query.yahooapis.com",
  changeOrigin: true,
});

app.use("/", theProxy);
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3002);

Answer 5

That's what I've been using for a while. Can handle both JSON and binary requests.

app.use('/api', (req, res, next) => {
    const redirectUrl = config.api_server + req.url.slice(1);
    const redirectedRequest = request({
        url: redirectUrl,
        method: req.method,
        body: req.readable ? undefined : req.body,
        json: req.readable ? false : true,
        qs: req.query,
        // Pass redirect back to the browser
        followRedirect: false
    });
    if (req.readable) {
        // Handles all the streamable data (e.g. image uploads)
        req.pipe(redirectedRequest).pipe(res);
    } else {
        // Handles everything else
        redirectedRequest.pipe(res);
    }
});