Using node.js to proxy http and websocket traffic - node.js

Question

I'm expanding on a node.js reverse proxy I put together with mikeal's request module: https://github.com/mikeal/request . It is a connect app that uses a small piece of custom middleware to check if the the current request is for an API route and if so it proxies it to and from a different API server like this:
.use(function(req, res, next){
if( /^\/api\//.test(req.url) ){
req.pipe(request(apiUrl + req.url))
.on('error', function(err){
handlePipeError(err, 'Error piping request to proxy server. Details: ');
})
.pipe(res)
.on('error', function(err){
handlePipeError(err, 'Error piping proxy response to client. Details: ')
});
function handlePipeError(err, customMsg) {
console.log( customMsg, err );
res.writeHead(503, {
'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(err.message, 'utf8'),
'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
res.end(err.message);
}
}
else {
next();
}
There is also some other middleware to handle static file serving and some other stuff. Once all the middleware is setup I start the server like this:
var server = require('http').createServer(app);
server.listen(port)
I would now like to expand this script to allow reverse proxying websocket connections. I tried using the nodejitsu/node-http-proxy to do modify the previous portion of the code like so:
var options = {
ws: true,
target: apiUrl,
secure: false,
xfwd: true
};
var wsProxy = require('http-proxy').createProxyServer(options);
var server = require('http').createServer(app);
server.on('upgrade', function (req, socket, head) {
console.log("--- CAUGHT UPGRADE ----");
wsProxy.ws(req, socket, head);
});
server.listen(port);
I notice the upgrade event fires off and the callback function does run but the websockets request isn't actually working (the client seems to never establish a connection). Is there a better way to achieve this