Building a Simple HTTP Proxy in Ruby

Ruby makes it easy to write network applications with its socket library and HTTP libraries like net/http.

First we require the needed libraries:

require 'socket'
require 'net/http'

Next we create a TCPServer to listen for connections:

server = TCPServer.new('localhost', 3000)

Then we loop through each connection:

while (connection = server.accept)
  # handle request
end

To handle each request we:

request = connection.read_nonblock(256)

url = request.split[1]

response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI(url))

connection.puts response

The full script:

require 'socket'
require 'net/http'

server = TCPServer.new('localhost', 3000)

while (connection = server.accept)
  request = connection.read_nonblock(256)
  url = request.split[1]

  response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI(url))

  connection.puts response
end

This gives you a very simple HTTP proxy in Ruby in just a few lines. Many improvements could be made but it demonstrates the basic approach.

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