hiproxy

hiproxy is a lightweight web proxy tool based on Node.js. The primary purpose of hiproxy is to solve the problem of host management and reverse proxy needs of developers. For example, if you are working as a team and each of the developers in the team need a different proxy setting, you will no longer need to modify your hosts file or use a web server like Nginx as a reverse proxy. hiproxy extends the syntax of hosts file to support port numbers. Besides, hiproxy also supports configuration through a syntax similar to the Nginx configuration file.

Why Hiproxy? If you are a front-end developer, it is not uncommon for you to encounter the following problems: Debugging web pages locally: To develop your web projects in a local development environment, you’ll have to run a back-end server (such as a Node.js express application, or a Java SpringBoot application). As a front-end developer, you might not be familiar with the back-end technology stack, simply setting up the development environment can consume a lot of your time. Cross-Origin Issues: While developing your front-end projects locally, you might need to solve cross-domain and cross-origin resource sharing issues. To address these problems, you will need to modify the response header. Self-Signed Certificates: You’ll often need to test https pages. When you visit https pages with a self-signed certificate, your browser will raise security warnings. One common way to modify the response header is to put a proxy as a “man in the middle”. NGINX, for example, has a nice syntax that you can configure as a reverse-proxy to handle all these needs. Although NGINX is a great tool to address all the above problems, when setting up NGINX, you’ll also modify your hosts file a lot to proxy the requests to a local NGINX service. This can especially turn out to be a burden if you are working on multiple projects. Can we have a better way to solve this problem? Well, yes. Meet hiproxy!