Expose options for underlying http client

[jgehrcke]

Is there a nice way here for exposing the additional configuration options for the underlying http client, such as timeout configuration?

[josnidhin]

I was looking for alternatives to request package and came across this package based on the list shown at request/request#3143

Timeouts are something that I found missing when evaluating this package for my use case.

[mikeal]

timeout isn’t actually supported in node.js and fetch. there’s a socket timeout in node.js and AFAIK there isn’t a timeout in fetch either. however, there are numerous quality timeout libraries for promises that will work generically with bent so that’s your best option.

[mpareja]

@mikeal Ancillary libraries for handling timeouts are insufficient without bent providing a mechanism to reclaim resources.

The request timeout implementation, for instance, aborts the request resulting in the TCP socket being torn down - that's important on a server. bent doesn't support setting a timeout nor gives us access to node's ClientRequest instance, so we won't have any way to tear down the TCP connection when using a timeout library.

Please consider re-opening this issue or warning others about this.

[mikeal]

I’m going to re-open. I hadn’t entirely recalled all the issues related to “cancellable promises” and aborting generally.

We may need to start returning new/special promises in order to do this properly

I’m still not sure that we’ll actually add a timeout feature, but we do need proper cancellation in order for users to be able to add a working timeout.

[icetbr]

You probably know how to do it, but heres the implementation of a timeout anyway

nodejs/node#12005 (comment)

[mikeal]

heres the implementation of a timeout

we need to make sure we provide an API that works in browers as well. this gets tricky because of how fetch needs to be aborted.

[Templum]

@mikeal Not so sure if an API makes sense here, given that as far as I can tell based on this fetch would require a specific property to be present. Similar to the nodejs specific solution. And with that required probably it is cleaner to have just a timeout property that in nodejs directly gets forwarded and for browser code get's wrapped.

Nevertheless as previously addressed it is an important feature, especially for the server side.