http.request fails when host contains port

[nfriedly]

host is different from hostname in that it may contain a port number. For example:

require('url').parse('http://localhost:8080')
{ protocol: 'http:',
  slashes: true,
  auth: null,
  host: 'localhost:8080',
  port: '8080',
  hostname: 'localhost',
  hash: null,
  search: null,
  query: null,
  pathname: '/',
  path: '/',
  href: 'http://localhost:8080/' }

However, http.request({options}) treats both fields as hostname and attempts an invalid DNS lookup when given a host with a port. For example:

http.get({host: 'localhost:8080', path: '/'}, console.log)

> Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND localhost:8080
    at errnoException (dns.js:44:10)
    at GetAddrInfoReqWrap.onlookup [as oncomplete] (dns.js:94:26)

[nfriedly]

Fixed, with a test :)

[nfriedly]

I also though about possibly adding a normalize() method to the URL library, which would handle this and related things... but that would be a larger change.

[jasnell]

This is due to the fact that the object you're passing into get does not have enough information to construct the URL properly. If you pass in the full output from url.parse then it works fine.

var u = require('url').parse('http://localhost:8080');
require('http').get(u, function(err,res) { console.log(res.statusCode); });

Closing as it's not actually a bug in node. Yes, the API could be doing things better, but this is the way it's worked for a while and it's not going to be changing in either v0.10 or v0.12.

[nfriedly]

I respectfully disagree. There is enough information to make the request correctly, the patch I provided (https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/25752/files) does exactly that with a simple 3-line change.

This bug was found when writing unit tests for a module that normally connects to a remote server. I change the host that my library uses from "example.com" to "localhost:12345" to match the mock remote server that I set up and then run the tests. This works correctly with my patch, but fails because node passes the wrong value to the dns lookup in the current 0.12 release.

[nfriedly]

(BTW, I'm OK if the fix doesn't get included in 0.10 and 0.12 - I'd just like to see it included eventually.)

[jasnell]

There are a number of issues with the url.parse response and the way url's are reconstructed from it. It's definitely a known issue, but it's certainly not going to be changing here. What I would recommend is moving discussion over to either the nodejs/io.js or nodejs/node repos.

[nfriedly]

Oh, alright. Thanks!