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To be congruent with other popular http clients the port should be stripped from the 'Host' field when the port is 80.

Closed Administrator requested to merge github/fork/celer/master into master

Created by: celer

Hi,

So we encountered an interesting problem today, less so a bug with node-http-proxy but more of a incongruent behavior from when compared against other browsers and client's we've tested.

When working with cloudfoundry.com we found that their proxy did not consider a request to port 80 the same if the port was explicitly specified in the 'Host' header field.

So a request to http://foo.cloudfoundry.com:80/ and http://foo.cloudfoundry.com/ behaved differently. We narrowed it down to the difference in the Host field. The changeOrign logic included the port when crafting the 'Host' header regardless of the port number.

No big deal right? Well so everyone else strips port 80 because it is the default :(

  • Curl strips port 80 from the Host header
  • wget strips port 80 from the Host header
  • Safari strips port 80 from the Host header
  • Firefox strips port 80 from the Host header
  • Chrome strips port 80 from the Host header

You can test the behavior using "http://helloworld-ng.cloudify.com:80/" and "http://helloworld-ng.cloudify.com/" - notice that both URLs work the same in all of the above listed browsers

In curl we can see the failure case

$ curl http://helloworld-ng.cloudfoundry.com:80/ -H "Host: helloworld-ng.cloudfoundry.com:80"
<html>
<head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
$ curl http://helloworld-ng.cloudfoundry.com:80/ -H "Host: helloworld-ng.cloudfoundry.com"
Hello from Cloud Foundry

(We've asked cloudfoundry to fix this issue, but to be clear the behavior in node-http-proxy is incongruent with every other client and browser we've tested)

So then the question becomes - should node-http-proxy do the same? Sadly it seems like this shouldn't be an issue but it is an unexpected behavior and no one else does it - hence why I think node-http-proxy should strip port 80 from the Host field if it is specified.