Proxying to another web service with Flask

Question

I want to proxy requests made to my Flask app to another web service running locally on the machine. I\'d rather use Flask for this than our higher-level nginx instance so

Answer 1

I have an implementation of a proxy using httplib in a Werkzeug-based app (as in your case, I needed to use the webapp's authentication and authorization).

Although the Flask docs don't state how to access the HTTP headers, you can use request.headers (see Werkzeug documentation). If you don't need to modify the response, and the headers used by the proxied app are predictable, proxying is staightforward.

Note that if you don't need to modify the response, you should use the werkzeug.wsgi.wrap_file to wrap httplib's response stream. That allows passing of the open OS-level file descriptor to the HTTP server for optimal performance.