So we are talking about to kinds of timeouts here, one is to connect to the server (connect timeout), the other timeout will happen when no data is send or received via the socket for a while (idle timeout).
Node sockets have a socket timeout, that can be used to synthesize both the connect and the idle timeout. This can be done by setting the socket timeout to the connect timeout and then when connected, setting it to the idle timeout.
example:
const request = http.request(url, {
timeout: connectTimeout,
});
request.setTimeout(idleTimeout);
This works because the timeout in the options is set immediately when creating the socket, the setTimeout function is run on the socket when connected!
Anyway, the question was about how to test the connect timeout. Ok so let's first park the idle timeout. We can simply test that by not sending any data for some time, that would cause the timeout. Check!
The connect timeout is a bit harder to test, the first thing that comes to mind is that we need a place to connect to that will not error, but also not connect. This would cause a timeout. But how the hell do we simulate that, in node?
If we think a little bit outside the box then we might figure out that this timeout is about the time it takes to connect. It does not matter why the connection takes as long as it does. We simply need to delay the time it takes to connect. This is not necessarily a server thing, we could also do it on the client. After all this is the part connecting, if we can delay it there, we can test the timeout.
So how could we delay the connection on the client side? Well, we can use the DNS lookup for that. Before the connection is made, a DNS lookup is done. If we simply delay that by 5 seconds or so we can test for the connect timeout very easily.
This is what the code could look like:
import * as dns from "dns";
import * as http from "http";
const url = new URL("http://localhost:8080");
const request = http.request(url, {
timeout: 3 * 1000, // connect timeout
lookup(hostname, options, callback) {
setTimeout(
() => dns.lookup(hostname, options, callback),
5 * 1000,
);
},
});
request.setTimeout(10 * 1000); // idle timeout
request.addListener("timeout", () => {
const message = !request.socket || request.socket.connecting ?
`connect timeout while connecting to ${url.href}` :
`idle timeout while connected to ${url.href}`;
request.destroy(new Error(message));
});
In my projects I usually use an agent that I inject. The agent then has the delayed lookup. Like this:
import * as dns from "dns";
import * as http from "http";
const url = new URL("http://localhost:8080");
const agent = new http.Agent({
lookup(hostname, options, callback) {
setTimeout(
() => dns.lookup(hostname, options, callback),
5 * 1000,
);
},
});
const request = http.request(url, {
timeout: 3 * 1000, // connect timeout
agent,
});
request.setTimeout(10 * 1000); // idle timeout
request.addListener("timeout", () => {
const message = !request.socket || request.socket.connecting ?
`connect timeout while connecting to ${url.href}` :
`idle timeout while connected to ${url.href}`;
request.destroy(new Error(message));
});
Happy coding!
