Unfortunately, it seems that proxy information must be set on each call to http.request. Node does not include a mechanism for global proxy settings.
The global-tunnel-ng module on NPM appears to handle this, however:
var globalTunnel = require('global-tunnel-ng');
globalTunnel.initialize({
host: '10.0.0.10',
port: 8080,
proxyAuth: 'userId:password', // optional authentication
sockets: 50 // optional pool size for each http and https
});
After the global settings are establish with a call to initialize, both http.request and the request library will use the proxy information.
The module can also use the http_proxy environment variable:
process.env.http_proxy = 'http://proxy.example.com:3129';
globalTunnel.initialize();