@ry I know this is a touchy subject for you. Can you review the patch?

Looking at this again this might not be needed and can instead be done with net:

var net = require('net');

var proxyPort = 8080;
var proxyHost = 'proxy.domain.com';
var requestHost = 'www.google.co.uk';
var requestPort = 443;

var proxy = net.connect(proxyPort, proxyHost, function() {
    proxy.write('CONNECT ' + requestHost + ':' + requestPort + ' HTTP/1.0\r\n');
    proxy.write('Connection: keep-alive\r\n');
    proxy.write('\r\n');
});

proxy.on('data', function(data) {
    var responseCode = data.toString().split('\r\n')[0].split(' ', 2)[1];
    if (responseCode == 200) {
        // connected to the proxy, but how to stream https requests?
    }
});

What I'm not sure about now is how to stream https.request() via this tunnel. Is this currently possible?

What I'm not sure about now is how to stream https.request() via this tunnel. Is this currently possible?

With a bit of work. Pass a custom https.Agent to https.request() that knows how to tunnel traffic. Your agent will have to establish the secure channel itself but you can hand off most of the heavy lifting to the tls module.

Hmm, that's going over my head.

Why do you need this? What does your proxy do with HTTP/1.1 clients?

Our client is HTTP/1.1 and should not ever need to pretend to be HTTP/1.0. You must justify why what this is needed.

The HTTP/1.0 request is needed to use the CONNECT verb create a tunnel to send HTTPS requests via a HTTP proxy. That said this probably wouldn't be the best place for it given what @bnoordhuis has said and this pull request can be closed.

Why do you need 1.0 for CONNECT

Doing some further tests it's not the 1.0 that's the problem, it's the Transfer-Encoding: chunked header that causes the 501. Taking that out makes it work. Updating https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/http.js#L1027 to

if (method === 'GET' || method === 'HEAD' || method === 'CONNECT') {

should fix it.

that would be an acceptable change. https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/20035931433a87e53d3726ec86fd5eedfed2c3fb/lib/http.js#L1027

I patched a local clone (cloned from v0.6) and it worked against the proxy but when writing a test for it it seems that a server created by http.createServer() doesn't like the CONNECT verb. (This is also present in an un-patched v0.6 branch build).

The following works and prints 200:

var http = require('http');
var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    req.on('end', function() {
        res.end();
        server.close();
    });
}).listen(12345, "localhost");
server.on('listening', function() {
    var options = {
        host: 'localhost',
        port: 12345,
        path: '/foo',
        method: 'GET'
    };
    var req = http.request(options, function(res) {
        console.log(res.statusCode);
    });
    req.on('error', function(e) {
        console.log(e);
    })
    req.end();
});

If I change method to CONNECT then I get:

{ [Error: socket hang up] code: 'ECONNRESET' }

I know with CONNECT that path should be a host/port and not a path so I removed the / at the beginning and I get the same error. Is this a bug in the server or something I'm doing wrong?

path should be example.com:80. Note that http.Server doesn't really support or understand CONNECT, your request handler won't get called.

Whitman, how did you get it to work with your proxy? What kind of proxy are you using? I ran into the same issue today and am struggling to get it to work (apache and mod_proxy) even with Transfer-Encoding: chunked disabled.

Where I stumble is how you would be able to write back out to it after you do the connect.

I couldn't get it to work in the end. I could CONNECT to the proxy but then, like you, couldn't figure out what to do with it next. As bnoordhuis said in a previous comment it could probably be done with a custom http.Agent but I wasn't really sure what I was doing with it so I abandoned it.