Can't use host headers?

[floydjdx]

Why do you delete host from headers? Can you make this optional?

[ijpiantanida]

Keeping the host header would make tapes specific to where talkback is running (port & host), which is not very useful.

What do you need the host header for?

[floydjdx]

The system I am working with extracts some information from the host header.

[ijpiantanida]

The host removal only affects tape matching.

The request that will be made to the downstream service will contain its own host header (set to the host property with which you started talkback).

[floydjdx]

Right, but I can only set one host property when I start talkback and my requests use different host headers depending on the request.

[ijpiantanida]

Talkback only fronts one service at a time, since it wouldn't have information to know where to route a request in case of multiple hosts.

If you're making requests to multiple services and you want to front them with talkback, you should start one talkback instance per service.

Something like this:

const service1 = talback({
  ...baseOpts,
  host: "https://my-service1.com",
  port: 8081,
  path: baseOpts.path + "/service1"
})
service1.start()

const service2 = talback({
  ...baseOpts,
  host: "https://my-service2.com",
  port: 8082,
  path: baseOpts.path + "/service2"
})
service2.start()

[floydjdx]

That won't work because all requests are meant to be sent to the same service but with different host headers depending on the user whose data is being requested.

[brandonc]

@ijpiantanida I believe @Floydjd is referring to https://github.com/ijpiantanida/talkback/blob/master/src/request-handler.ts#L125 where the host header is deleted during makeRealRequest

I'm debugging an issue whereby removing the host header causes a mismatch for signed requests (aws in this case) which includes the host header value in it's signing. I also looked into node-fetch, your upstream dependency, and found that it does not add a host header. However, according to Mozilla

A Host header must be sent in all HTTP/1.1 requests and serves may respond with 400 for any request that lacks a host header

(source)

I think the right thing to do is maybe to overwrite the host header if it is not set to be the options.host: https://github.com/ijpiantanida/talkback/pull/51

I can't think of a reason that we wouldn't want a host header in this request under any circumstances. WDYT?

[ijpiantanida]

node-fetch should be adding the host header.

I locally aliased mystrangedomain.com to localhost.

What host option are you giving to talkback?

[brandonc]

@ijpiantanida Thanks for looking into this so quickly. You are right! I tested from the fetch side but didn't consider that node http is actually setting the host. Once I checked from the server side as you did I saw the host there.

Theoretically, deleting the host header should work! I'm not sure why it does not but I will debug some more.

[brandonc]

@ijpiantanida I must have made a mistake with a local modified version of talkback. deleting the host header works fine :grimacing: thank you, again.