We had a short talk about HTTP proxies in Go. As expected, Go supports the
usual environment variables, like HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY -
and you can easily customize the proxy selection, as we saw in an example code
walkthrough of an ip rotation proxy.
The x/net package contains support in x/net/http/httpproxy.
A couple of fun facts from the talk:
- The first book on HTTP proxies was published in 1998: “Web Proxy Servers” by Ari Luotonen (CERN), who also wrote a web proxy tunneling draft.
- Many popular HTTP projects (including Go) were affected by a critical CVE, related to CGI up until 2016. Note that the discussion and development of “server scripts” started in 1993.
- Core curl developer explains,
why curl does not follow RFC in each and every aspect, e.g. when it comes to
the
Proxy-Connectionheader - he sums it up as “The world wild web is a crazy place.”
The presentation can be found here: HTTP Getaway (part 2): HTTP proxy intro
See you next time!
