I tried bundling http-parser in the Node.js package on EPEL 7, but that revealed another issue. We've been carrying a patch for Node.js that makes it compatible with OpenSSL 1.0.1 (which was present on RHEL 7.0 through RHEL 7.3). However, RHEL 7.4 contains OpenSSL 1.0.2 and this version is what is in the official Fedora/EPEL 7 build repositories on the Koji Build System. The design of the OpenSSL compat patch is such that it sees that OpenSSL 1.0.2 is present in the build-system and skips all of the changes.

As a result, we cannot build Node.js in EPEL 7 with OpenSSL 1.0.1 support at this time (without a significant effort to rework the compatibility patches). So regardless of the http-parser issue, we require packages from RHEL 7.4 in order to function either way.

I am currently rebuilding the Node.js package with the knowledge that it can only work with http-parser and OpenSSL from the 7.4 repositories. This means that Node.js will not be installable from EPEL on CentOS until CentOS 7.4 packages are publicly available.

I apologize for the inconveniences that I know this must cause. It should hopefully only be a few days before CentOS 7.4 is released and the problem will more or less disappear.