end an HTTP request after receiving headers in Node?

Question

end an HTTP request after receiving headers in Node?

I'm writing a Node.js application that makes an HTTP request, and then depending on the headers it receives, I want to either process the results of that request, or terminate the request. In particular, if the file I'm attempting to download is too large, I want to stop the request (and the download; that means I can't just ignore the results, because it will still be downloading in the background). Is there a way to do this? I can't find it in the Node docs. Example code:

http.get(requestParams, function(res) {
  var bodyData = "";

  try {
    if(parseInt(res.headers['content-length']) > settings.maxSize) {
      done(new Error("Response is too large: " + res.headers['content-length']));
      // is there something I should do here to end the request?
      return;
    } else {
      log.debug("Content length of " + res.headers['content-length'] + " is under limit of " + settings.maxSize);
    }
  } catch(ex) {
    done(new Error("Error parsing content-length from response header:" + util.inspect(ex)));
    return;
  }

  res.setEncoding('utf8');

  res.on('data', function (chunk) {
    bodyData += chunk;
  });
  res.on('end', function() {
    done(null, bodyData);
  });
}).on('error', function(e) {
  done(e);
});

http
node.js

Answer 1

http.get() returns a request object, which has an abort method, which you can use to abort the current request

E.G.

var req = http.get(params, function(res){
    //content-length too large
    req.abort();
});

From the docs - http://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_request_abort

Aborts a request. (New since v0.3.8.)

So unless you are using a very old version of node this should work for you.