A SIMPLE MULTI-THREADED JAVA HTTP PROXY SERVER

This post is to show an example of a simple multi-threaded Java HTTP Proxy Server. This sample is not fully functional for every application. It’s very simple and works fine for HTTP GET requests, but is not coded to properly handle HTTP POST requests (nor any other HTTP methods). This is strictly as an example to show how simple it is to proxy requests. This one simply records the url of all requests that are passed through it. Please let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to steal it and improve on it. Let me know what you come up with.
This first bit of code is the actual multithreaded server. It simply starts up the proxy server on a given port, takes in an HTTP request, and spawns off the request to a new thread passing the socket to the thread, and starts that thread on the request.

package proxy;

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class ProxyServer {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        ServerSocket serverSocket = null;
        boolean listening = true;

        int port = 10000;	//default
        try {
            port = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            //ignore me
        }

        try {
            serverSocket = new ServerSocket(port);
            System.out.println("Started on: " + port);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Could not listen on port: " + args[0]);
            System.exit(-1);
        }

        while (listening) {
            new ProxyThread(serverSocket.accept()).start();
        }
        serverSocket.close();
    }
}

This is the real meat of the application. However, it’s still a fairly simple class. It’s a thread that starts up, then receives the incoming request from the client, resends the request to the real server that the client intended to send it to (while logging the request), then receives the response from the real server, and propogates that same response to the client. Fairly simple process.

package proxy;

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class ProxyThread extends Thread {
    private Socket socket = null;
    private static final int BUFFER_SIZE = 32768;
    public ProxyThread(Socket socket) {
        super("ProxyThread");
        this.socket = socket;
    }

    public void run() {
        //get input from user
        //send request to server
        //get response from server
        //send response to user

        try {
            DataOutputStream out =
		new DataOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
		new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));

            String inputLine, outputLine;
            int cnt = 0;
            String urlToCall = "";
            ///////////////////////////////////
            //begin get request from client
            while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
                try {
                    StringTokenizer tok = new StringTokenizer(inputLine);
                    tok.nextToken();
                } catch (Exception e) {
                    break;
                }
                //parse the first line of the request to find the url
                if (cnt == 0) {
                    String[] tokens = inputLine.split(" ");
                    urlToCall = tokens[1];
                    //can redirect this to output log
                    System.out.println("Request for : " + urlToCall);
                }

                cnt++;
            }
            //end get request from client
            ///////////////////////////////////

            BufferedReader rd = null;
            try {
                //System.out.println("sending request
		//to real server for url: "
                //        + urlToCall);
                ///////////////////////////////////
                //begin send request to server, get response from server
                URL url = new URL(urlToCall);
                URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
                conn.setDoInput(true);
                //not doing HTTP posts
                conn.setDoOutput(false);
                //System.out.println("Type is: "
			//+ conn.getContentType());
                //System.out.println("content length: "
			//+ conn.getContentLength());
                //System.out.println("allowed user interaction: "
			//+ conn.getAllowUserInteraction());
                //System.out.println("content encoding: "
			//+ conn.getContentEncoding());
                //System.out.println("content type: "
			//+ conn.getContentType());

                // Get the response
                InputStream is = null;
                HttpURLConnection huc = (HttpURLConnection)conn;
                if (conn.getContentLength() > 0) {
                    try {
                        is = conn.getInputStream();
                        rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
                    } catch (IOException ioe) {
                        System.out.println(
				"********* IO EXCEPTION **********: " + ioe);
                    }
                }
                //end send request to server, get response from server
                ///////////////////////////////////

                ///////////////////////////////////
                //begin send response to client
                byte by[] = new byte[ BUFFER_SIZE ];
                int index = is.read( by, 0, BUFFER_SIZE );
                while ( index != -1 )
                {
                  out.write( by, 0, index );
                  index = is.read( by, 0, BUFFER_SIZE );
                }
                out.flush();

                //end send response to client
                ///////////////////////////////////
            } catch (Exception e) {
                //can redirect this to error log
                System.err.println("Encountered exception: " + e);
                //encountered error - just send nothing back, so
                //processing can continue
                out.writeBytes("");
            }

            //close out all resources
            if (rd != null) {
                rd.close();
            }
            if (out != null) {
                out.close();
            }
            if (in != null) {
                in.close();
            }
            if (socket != null) {
                socket.close();
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Hope you enjoy and learn a little from how simple it is in Java to perform network requests, as well as multi-threading to create a somewhat useful application that can be easily extended to be much more useful. Hope this helps.

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November 27, 2007 | Written by John Melton | Filed Under Java