net/http: Expose the normal transport RoundTripper for WASM/js

[antong]

On WASM, the standard http.Transfer RoundTripper is not exposed for external use. Buildflags for wasm replace the standard implementation of RoundTripper with a special version that uses the browser Fetch API. The special JS RoundTripper does not seem to use or honor any of the documented settings provided by http.Transport, such as Dial or DialContext. But the way the special JS RoundTripper is implemented as methods on http.Transport, it prevents using the standard RoundTripper.

There are use cases for using the normal RoundTripper, for instance for testing and simulation in the browser. The normal RoundTripper is compiled and included in the binary anyway, and works perfectly well, but is masked by the browser version.

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go1.11

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

GOOS=js
GOARCH=wasm

What did you do?

I tried to configure a http.Client to use a transport with a custom dial function:
https://play.golang.org/p/dnyTivQ643J

This works on all other platforms including the playground, but on WASM, the same, special Roundtripper is always used and there is no way to use the standard Roundtripper.

What did you expect to see?

Get https://api.ipify.org/: expected error, all ok

What did you see instead?

On WASM:

192.0.2.77
Done.

On other platforms, I get the expected result

[andybons]

@neelance @dmitshur

[antong]

I quickly tested two hacks to do this, and both seemed to work. Both pass the tests on normal platforms, but I don't know how to run the unit tests on WASM.

Hack 1: Don't implement the special RoundTripper on http.Transport, but make an own jsTransport. Set an instance of this as http.DefaultTransport for GOARCH=wasm. Example: e8050da

Hack 2: Mod the special RoundTripper to instead use the normal RoundTripper if the caller has set options on the Transport. Example: 8137bf5

[agnivade]

@johanbrandhorst

[dmitshur]

This is also related to #25695.

[rubensayshi]

running into this problem when trying to do HTTPS requests in wasm/js (using self signed certs over a websocket connection).

e8050da seems like an easy and clean solution to enable a lot more flexibility when desired.

as far as I can tell the only place where http.Client and http.Transport are coupled to something that does not work in wasm/js is the DefaultTransport using net.Dialer{}).DialContext.
Given a working net.Dialer the code in roundTrip actually works just fine.

I understand #25695 discusses a more major problem, but specially considering the impact of fixing that as a whole, maybe a simple fix like this would be a good start?

[johanbrandhorst]

I agree Hack 1 as proposed by @antong is a reasonable short term approach. Are you interested in contributing this?

[antong]

Sure! Do you mean that I should make a CL based on Hack 1 (e8050da)?

[johanbrandhorst]

Yes, that sounds good.

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/166617 mentions this issue: net/http: expose standard transport for js

[hullarb]

Hi all,

i just bumped into this issues as i tried to implement some tunneling for http request in wasm.
It's a pity that the above PR was abandoned.
i also have a very minimalistic change( 8327844) that i could use for testing my http tunneling.

As Transport currently does not provide any ways to customize the wasm/js RoundTrip behavior i wonder if it would not be fair to simple fallback to the "normal" roundTrip implementation in case a custom Transport struct is the caller and not the DeafultTransport (
the js RoundTrip implementation has already a fallback to the real transport RoundTrip implementation in case the fetch api is not available).