I want to proxy requests made to my Flask app to another web service running locally on the machine. I'd rather use Flask for this than our higher-level nginx instance so that we can reuse our existing authentication system built into our app. The more we can keep this "single sign on" the better.
Is there an existing module or other code to do this? Trying to bridge the Flask app through to something like httplib or urllib is proving to be a pain.
I have an implementation of a proxy using httplib in a Werkzeug-based app (as in your case, I needed to use the webapp's authentication and authorization).
Although the Flask docs don't state how to access the HTTP headers, you can use request.headers (see Werkzeug documentation). If you don't need to modify the response, and the headers used by the proxied app are predictable, proxying is staightforward.
Note that if you don't need to modify the response, you should use the werkzeug.wsgi.wrap_file to wrap httplib's response stream. That allows passing of the open OS-level file descriptor to the HTTP server for optimal performance.