Add support for custom http.agent.

[ghost]

Using custom http.agent has been supported by web3.js and it has some many use cases.

Using proxy-agent for connecting remote nodes via SOCKS5 or HTTP proxy

web3/web3.js#887
web3/web3.js#2827

Using client ssl certiciates for http provider

web3/web3.js#2395

Many npm libraries like axios also supports using custom http.agent as well

https://github.com/axios/axios#request-config

Also, this will help with developers connecting remote nodes with some networking restrictions ( censorship, firewalls, etc ).

Also suggesting to give an ability to use custom user-agent headers to hide information about users.

[ghost]

Hello, what do you think for my proposal? @ricmoo

[ricmoo]

I don't know this will make it into v5, but is certainly a candidate for v6.

I'll move it to the Ideas discussion.

[ghost]

Added a PR to address this issue #2829

[ludekvodicka]

Hello, Is there any progress on this feature? I would need proxy support in ethers.js too. Thanks

[ricmoo]

This will not be added until v6, the beta is out now but this has. It yet been added to the v6 beta branch.

[mumup]

Hello, Is there any progress on this feature? I would need proxy support in ethers.js too. Thanks

[ricmoo]

This feature is fully present and available in v6.

I should make a cookbook entry on how to configure it, but here are the jsdocs. :)

[crystalbit]

but people are (still) using v5 as v6 has completely broken compatibility

[mumup]

import { FetchGetUrlFunc, FetchRequest, FetchCancelSignal } from "ethers";

const fetchGetUrlFunc: FetchGetUrlFunc = (
  req: FetchRequest,
  signal?: FetchCancelSignal
) => {
// code copy from "src.ts/utils/geturl.ts"
// and then I add the proxy code into it.
}

FetchRequest.registerGetUrl(fetchGetUrlFunc)

This can work normally and successfully use the proxy, but it doesn’t seem very elegant. Looking forward to your documentation.

[BB-301]

@mumup This was very useful to me, so thank you for posting this! :) And of course also thank you @ricmoo for adding support for this feature (and for the library in general)!

I am using Ethers.js version 6.11.1 in my project. I needed this feature because I wanted to experiment with proxying requests through Tor using SOCKS5. My code looks like this:

import * as ethers from "ethers";
import { SocksProxyAgent } from "socks-proxy-agent";

ethers.FetchRequest.registerGetUrl(ethers.FetchRequest.createGetUrlFunc({
    agent: new SocksProxyAgent(`socks5://127.0.0.1:9050`, {})
}));

Note the use of ethers.FetchRequest.createGetUrlFunc, which might be what you were looking for when you wrote ...but it doesn't seem very element.

[liesauer]

is there any tricky solutions in v5? i am using uniswap sdk, not directly use ethers.js, is not easy to just upgrade to v6, it causes tons of dependency issues.

[ricmoo]

There isn’t really a way to do it in v5, it was never designed with that in mind, so anything to make it work would also be backwards incompatible.

Ethers (v6 as well as v5) were designed to be sub-classed though, so you could probably sub-class the AbstractProvider to add that support.

I am unfamiliar with how nock works, but whatever it does, it completely hijacks the http and https libraries in node, so perhaps there is a way to use it (or similar package) to slot out compatibility. Looking quickly at the documentation, I believe the technique they use could likely be used in ethers v5, but would require some additional research. If you figure it out, please post it back here and I can include it on the cookbook section of the v5 docs.

This feature was one of the motivations behind the abstraction of FetchRequest in v6, so that it would be possible to swap such a low-level feature out for another.