How can I use an http proxy with node.js http.Client?

I think there a better alternative to the answers as of 2019. We can use the global-tunnel-ng package to initialize proxy and not pollute the http or https based code everywhere. So first install global-tunnel-ng package:

npm install global-tunnel-ng

Then change your implementations to initialize proxy if needed as:

const globalTunnel = require('global-tunnel-ng');

globalTunnel.initialize({
  host: 'proxy.host.name.or.ip',
  port: 8080
});

Just run nodejs with proxy wrapper like tsocks tsocks node myscript.js

Original solution: Doing http requests through a SOCKS5 proxy in NodeJS

More info: https://www.binarytides.com/proxify-applications-with-tsocks-and-proxychains-on-ubuntu/

For windows: https://superuser.com/questions/319516/how-to-force-any-program-to-use-socks

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/d5aadbcaa00c3f7/12ebf01d7ec415c3?lnk=gst&q=proxy#12ebf01d7ec415c3

Based on the answers from this thread it would seem like you could use proxychains to run node.js through the proxy server:
$ proxychains /path/to/node application.js

Personally I wasnt able to install any of the proxychains versions on Cygwin/Windows environment so couldn't test it.

Furthermore, they also talked about using connect-proxy but I could not find any documentation on how to do this.

In short, I'm still stuck, but maybe someone can use this info to find a suitable work-around.

If you have the Basic http authentication scheme you have to make a base64 string of myuser:mypassword, and then add "Basic" in the beginning. That's the value of Proxy-Authorization header, here an example:

var Http = require('http');

var req = Http.request({
    host: 'myproxy.com.zx',
    port: 8080,
    headers:{"Proxy-Authorization": "Basic bXl1c2VyOm15cGFzc3dvcmQ="},
    method: 'GET',
    path: 'http://www.google.com/'
    }, function (res) {
        res.on('data', function (data) {
        console.log(data.toString());
    });
});

req.end();

In nodejs you could use Buffer to encode

var encodedData = Buffer.from('myuser:mypassword').toString('base64');

console.log(encodedData);

Just as example, in browsers you could encode in base64 using btoa(), useful in ajax requests in a browser without proxy settings performing a request using proxy.

var encodedData = btoa('myuser:mypassword')

console.log(encodedData);

How to find wich scheme accepts the proxy server?

If we don't have a custom DNS configured (that would throw something like ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED), when we perform a request, the response (code 407) should inform in the response headers which http authentication scheme the proxy is using.

Only set the environment variable and the http will use proxy.

const env = {
    "host": "proxy.server.com.br",
    "port": 8080,
    "user": "my-user",
    "pass": "my-pass"
};

process.env.http_proxy =
  process.env.https_proxy =
    `http://${env.user}:${env.pass}@${env.host}:${env.port}/`;