Node http module error when requesting a .org domain

Question

Node http module error when requesting a .org domain

When I use the http module to GET a .org domain I get a 400 response. (Tried with google.org so it's not a server error.) Is this normal behavior?

var http = require('http');
http.get("google.org", function(res) {
  console.log("Got response: " +     res.statusCode);
}).on('error', function(e) {
  console.log("Got error: " + e.message);
});

node.js

Answer 1

Your code issues the following HTTP request:

GET google.org HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost

It's your local machine that's responding with a 400 (since the request is indeed invalid). This happens because internally, node uses the url module to parse the string you pass to http.get. url sees the string google.org as a relative path.

url.parse('google.org');

{ protocol: null,
  slashes: null,
  auth: null,
  host: null,
  port: null,
  hostname: null,
  hash: null,
  search: null,
  query: null,
  pathname: 'google.org',
  path: 'google.org',
  href: 'google.org' }

Since your string parses to a null hostname, node defaults to using localhost.

Try using a fully-qualified URL.

var http = require('http');
http.get("http://google.org", function(res) {
  console.log("Got response: " +     res.statusCode);
}).on('error', function(e) {
  console.log("Got error: " + e.message);
});