njs and subrequests

[Valentin V. Bartenev]

On Saturday, 17 November 2018 17:06:12 MSK Antoine Bonavita wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> For a pet project of mine I'm trying to use njs to retrieve data from a
> number of different sources (URLs really) and assemble them into one single
> response. I tried to implement a proof of concept using subrequest (from
> ngx_http_js_module) to do so. I quickly realized that it works only for
> internal subrequests (i.e. not to external servers).
> 
> I worked around this with the following location:
>     location = /fwd-proxy {
>         proxy_pass $arg_tgt;
>     }
> 
> We all know nginx is not really a forward proxy and this approach does not
> seem very nice for the long term.
> 
> So, I have a few cascading questions:
> 1 - Is there any plan to have subrequest from ngx_http_js_module support
> external URLs ?
> 2 - If answer to 1 is no, is there any plan to have another official js
> module implement it ?
> 3 - If no, what would make most sense: implement it as a 3rd-party module
> or completely move to something different (nginx Unit with Node.js comes to
> mind) ? And why one rather than the other ?
> 
> Thank you for reading so far and evne more thanks if you are kind enough to
> hit the reply button.
> 

Just to make it clear, "subrequest" is not a js module part.  It's a generic
nginx mechanism used by many modules (including ssi, auth_request, addition)
to request _internal_ resources.  The js module just provides you an API
for this mechanism to make ssi-like subrequests.

You're looking for a different thing, in fact you need an http client in the
js module to request external resources.  That's not something provided right
now, but will be nice to have in the future.

  wbr, Valentin V. Bartenev