Question

I’ve got an app that fires off https requests to a 3rd party service to perform logging. For some reason or another I noticed a few hours ago that the 3rd party is refusing the connections. That’s a different topic though.

What I’m noticing in my node.js app is that despite the requests being created dynamically, and therefore shouldn’t be hanging the entire app, they are.

After a restart of the process, the https request is hanging and then dies with a connection refused error. Sample code is below.

var logger = function(data){

    var req = https.request({
        host: 'logs.loggly.com',
        port: 443,
        path: '/inputs/<my real key is here, removed obviously>',
        method: 'POST',
        headers:{
            'content-type': 'application/json'
        }
    }, function(res){
        var body = [];
        res.on('chunk', function(data){
            body.push(data);
        });
        res.on('end', function(){
            console.log(body.join(''));
        })
    });
    req.write(JSON.stringify(data));
    req.end();

}

And that’s called simply by:

logger({ 'test': 'datafoo' });

So I’m curious why a connection refused/timeout from this outbound https request should be hanging and then crashing the entire app.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The program hangs and prints nothing because it’s not catching data and you’re not telling the process to do anything but print an empty string with [].join(''). Node.js won’t return without explicit instruction on IO-bound tasks. You need to pass in and execute a callback function, or call process.exit();, in the handler for res.on("end", [handler]);, e.g.:

res.on("end", function() {
    console.log(body.join(''));
    process.exit();
});

res.on("chunk", [handler]); isn’t a standard HTTPS event. You likely intended something like res.on("data", function(chunk) { body.push(chunk); });.