http and https proxy usage

[alexwhitman]

At work all of our network traffic to the 'outside' goes through a http proxy (squid) and I'm finding that a lot of modules don't natively support http/https via a proxy. It's generally easy enough to modify the modules to use a http proxy but then I have to patch them at every new release. It would be more difficult to patch modules to use an SSL or SOCKS proxy.

It would be awesome if there was a method of specifying that a nodejs app should use proxy settings either defined in the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables or on Windows the IE proxy settings. Even more useful would be support for Proxy auto-config files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config) so internal requests can be set to not go via the proxy.

[bnoordhuis]

We're not going to do that. I've toyed with the idea in the past but it's non-trivial to implement and an absolute nightmare to support.

[alexwhitman]

it's non-trivial to implement

Exactly why I think it should be in the core rather than none/few/many different implementations in modules. Understandable but a shame.