Let's suppose you were running multiple http application servers, but you only wanted to expose one machine to the internet. You could setup node-http-proxy on that one machine and then reverse-proxy the incoming http requests to locally running services which were not exposed to the outside network.

Installing node-http-proxy

 npm install http-proxy

How to use node-http-proxy

proxying requests using http.Server

  var sys = require('sys'),
      colors = require('colors')
      http = require('http');

  var httpProxy = require('./lib/node-http-proxy').httpProxy;

  http.createServer(function (req, res){
    var proxy = new httpProxy;
    proxy.init(req, res);
    sys.puts('proxying request to http://localhost:9000');
    proxy.proxyRequest('localhost', '9000', req, res);
  }).listen(8000);

  http.createServer(function (req, res){
    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
    res.write('request successfully proxied!' + '\n' + JSON.stringify(req.headers, true, 2));
    res.end();
  }).listen(9000);

see the demo for further examples.

Why doesn't node-http-proxy have more advanced features like x, y, or z?

if you have a suggestion for a feature currently not supported, feel free to open a support issue. node-http-proxy is designed to just proxy https request from one server to another, but we will be soon releasing many other complimentary projects that can be used in conjunction with node-http-proxy