How can I make this call to request in nodejs synchronous?

You can with deasync:

function get_source_at(uri){
    var source;
    request({ uri:uri}, function (error, response, body) {
        source = body;
        console.log(body);
    });
    while(source === undefined) {
      require('deasync').runLoopOnce();
    }
    return source;
}