How to create a nodejs HTTP server with an existing TLS client socket?

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I have a nodejs TLS client socket on my laptop, connected to a TLS server socket on a different computer (server). The server cannot connect to my laptop. The laptop needs to initiate the connection.

Now I want the server to make requests to my laptop. The idea is to reuse the HTTP protocol. Is there a way to create a HTTP server using the existing TLS client socket?

This way, the server machine can make a HTTP request, and the client TLS receives it, and the HTTP server would parse it? Or am I missing something?

tls1.2 node.js ssl
1 Answers

Once you have a TCP socket open between laptop and server, you can send data either way over that socket. So, if the server wants to send some query to the laptop, it can do so just fine. You will have to invent your own protocol on top of TCP to do that, but it could be as simple as a text/line based protocol if you want.

Or, instead of making a plain TCP connection, you can make a webSocket or socket.io connection from the laptop to the server (instead of the plain TCP connection) and then either side can send messages either way and the protocol part is already taken care of. If you use socket.io, it will automatically reconnect if the connection is interrupted too.

There is no simple way to attach an HTTP server to an existing TCP socket and it would be fraught with difficulties too because an HTTP connection is generally not a continuous connection over which you send many separate requests (advanced versions of http can do that, but I doubt you want to get into implementing all that logic on both ends). You could use the HTTP protocol over your existing TCP socket, but that would probably be substantially more work to implement than just use the webSocket/socket.io idea above.

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