Guide: How to make node js application which is http work on a https front end - node.js

I could not find a single comprehensive guide on this issue so I thought I'd create a easy guide for those who find themselves with a similar situation.

what I used:
vps with cpanel for front end.
amazon ec2 linux for back end node js app
follow this guide to install node js on ec2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHAQ3TzUTro
problem: node js app does not output anything on a https front end.
solution: install nginx server and use that to convert your http backend to a https subdomain so it can be displayed by the https front end.
example:
Point your subdomain to the ip of your ec2 instance ex: api.mywebsite.com => 11.22.33.44
in this example a nodeJS app hosted on a ec2 instance on port 8080 with IP http://11.22.33.44:8080
currently the clock doesn't display anything on https://mywebsite.com. but it should work on http://mywebsite.com
get autossl certificates from cpanel for https://mywebsite.com. and https://api.mywebsite.com.
copy and paste the certificate block of text into a notepad
copy and paste the private key block of text into a notepad
Follow this guide to install nginx and redirect your node js app at http://11.22.33.44:8080 TO http://11.22.33.44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EBARqreeao
now connect to your ec2 instance with ssh.
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl
sudo chmod 700 /etc/nginx/ssl
this creates a folder to put your server.crt and server.key in.
sudo vim /etc/nginx/ssl/server.crt
copy your autossl certificate of api.mywebsite.com and save
sudo vim /etc/nginx/ssl/server.key
copy your autossl private key of api.mywebsite.com and save
sudo vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
now go back to your configuration file from the previous video and change the locations of your ssl certificate and ssl key
the bottom of your .conf file should look like this.
sudo nginx -s reload
now reload your server and https://api.mywebsite.com should load whatever is on http://11.22.33.44:8080 with a "connection is secure" tag. and your https front end https://mywebsite.com should display what is on https://api.mywebsite.com

Related

How to open localhost:8000 using VPS Ubuntu

hello I need help how to open http://localhost:8000 from my pc. because my project polkadot substrate installed on a VPS Ubuntu, after I try to open IP:8000 it also doesn't work
Images
You have to run the substrate node using --rpc-cors all option. Please note that substrate chains don't expose websocket connections to the public internet without some hacking. I am assuming your question asks how to connect a substrate node running on a remote server to your local pc front end. If that's right let's continue:
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/maintain-wss
Describes the entire process. You need to install NGINX, configure /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and within the http code block insert the mentioned code, with proper variable replacements. Then generate a self-signed SSL certificate, and open port 9944 and 443 on your remote machine. Next visit the machine with https://IP:443 to whitelist that site, and finally connect to your substrate node with a local installation of polkadot-js-apps. You cannot connect it using the online polkadot.js explorer , so you must use a local connection. And that should get you up and running.

host public node js website on amazon AWS LightSail without Bitnami

I have an amazon AWS LightSail instance and have installed Node js downloaded from nodejs.org. Now the setup is complete and I am able to launch my nodejs webpage inside LightSail instance using "http://localhost but when I try to do it using the lightsail public IP from any other laptop, it not getting accessible (getting web error as "This site can’t be reached").
I have set the node js to listen to port 80 which is open by default.
A lot of materials shows that bitnami as a way to do it but can't I use normal node js installation to make the website public. Appreciate any guidance on this
Bitnami Engineer here,
You can configure your Nodejs app to use the port 3000 and then configure Apache to ProxyPass the requests to that port. This way you will be able to access your app using http and https. Does that sound good? You will need to run these commands:
Create the folders
sudo mkdir -p /opt/bitnami/apps/myapp
sudo mkdir /opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/conf
sudo mkdir /opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/htdocs
Create a /opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/conf/httpd-prefix.conf file with this content
Include "/opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/conf/httpd-app.conf"
Add this content to the /opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/conf/httpd-app.conf file
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
Add this line to the /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/bitnami-apps-prefix.conf file
Include "/opt/bitnami/apps/myapp/conf/httpd-prefix.conf"
Restart Apache
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
You have more information in our documentation
https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/infrastructure/nodejs/administration/create-custom-application-nodejs/

How can I access my nodejs web server from my local computer using the server domain name?

I installed nodejs and created a sample app. When I run npm start I get a message saying that I can open my web browser to http://localhost:3000 to see the app in action, but this installation is on a web server - not my local computer, so, instead of localhost:3000 I want to get there using something like mydomain.com:3000
I can't find the answer, it's very likely I just don't know how to search for it... any ideas?
I'm following the tutorial here: https://facebook.github.io/react/tutorial/tutorial.html
I think I only needed to get away from this for a while. I got it working using ssh local forwarding.
I already used an ssh config file to log in to my server without having to remember the password, so I just added this line to my config file:
LocalForward localhost:3000 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3000
where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is my server IP address.
Then, I connected to my server via ssh:
ssh -f -N mysite
Once connected, I open up the browser and go to localhost:3000 and there it is now.
I used my ssh config file, but it should also work without it.
ssh -f -N -R 3000:localhost:3000 mydomain.com
I found this command that eventually led me to solve my problem in this link: http://stuff-things.net/2016/01/20/tunneling-to-localhost/

Run node.js on cpanel hosting server

It is a simple node.js code.
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type' : 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World!');
}).listen(8080);
I uploaded it on cpanel hosting server and installed node.js and run it.
If a server is normal server I can check script result by accessing 'http://{serverip}:8080'. But on cpanel is hosting domain and sub domain and every domain is matched by every sites. Even http://{serverip} is not valid url.
How can I access my node.js result?
Kindly teach me.
Thanks.
bingbing.
Install/Setup NodeJS with CPanel
1. Log in to your account using SSH (if it is not enabled for your account, contact the support team).
2. Download Node.js
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/node-v10.0.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz
3. Extract the Node.js files
tar xvf node-v10.0.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz
4.Now rename the folder to "nodejs". To do this, type the following command
mv node-v10.0.0-linux nodejs
5. Now to install the node and npm binaries, type the following commands:
mkdir ~/bin <br> cp nodejs/bin/node ~/bin
cd ~/bin
ln -s
../nodejs/lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js npm
6. Node.js and npm are installed on your account. To verify this, type the following commands
node --version
npm --version
The ~/bin directory is in your path by default, which means you can run node and npm from any directory in your account.
7. Start Node.js Application
nohup node my_app.js &
8. Stop the Application
pkill node
9. Integrating a Node.js application with the web server(optional)
Depending on the type of Node.js application you are running, you may want to be able to access it using a web browser. To do this, you need to select an unused port for the Node.js application to listen on, and then define server rewrite rules that redirect visitors to the application.
In a text editor, add the following lines to the .htaccess file in the/home/username/public_html directory, where username represents your account username:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ http://127.0.0.1:XXXXX/ [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:XXXXX/$1 [P,L]
In both RewriteRule lines, replace XXXXX with the port on which your Node.js application listens.
To run a Node.js application on a managed server, you must select an unused port, and the port number must be between 49152 and 65535(inclusive).
Save the changes to the .htaccess file, and then exit the text editor. Visitors to your website are redirected to the Node.js application listening on the specified port.
If your application fails to start, the port you chose may already be in use. Check the application log for error codes like EADDRINUSE that indicate the port is in use. If it is, select a different port number, update your application’s configuration and the .htaccess file, and then try again.
cPanel typically runs Apache or another web server that is shared among all the cPanel/unix accounts. The web server listens on port 80. Depending on the domain name in the requested URL, the web server uses "Virtual Hosting" to figure out which cPanel/unix account should process the request, i.e. in which home directory to find the files to serve and scripts to run. If the URL only contains an IP address, cPanel has to default to one of cPanel accounts.
Ordinarily, without root access, a job run by a cPanel account cannot listen on port 80. Indeed, the available ports might be quite restrictive. If 8080 doesn't work, you might try 60000. To access a running node.js server, you'll need to have the port number it's listening on. Since that is the only job listening on that port on that server, you should be able to point your browser to the domain name of any of the cPanel accounts or even the IP address of the server, adding the port number to the URL. But, it's typical to use the domain name for the cPanel account running the node.js job, e.g. http://cPanelDomainName.com:60000/ .
Of course port 80 is the default for web services, and relatively few users are familiar with optional port numbers in URLs. To make things easier for users, you can use Apache to "reverse proxy" requests on port 80 to the port that the node.js process is listening on. This can be done using Apache's RewriteRule directive in a configuration or .htaccess file. This reverse proxying of requests arguably has other benefits as well, e.g. Apache may be a more secure, reliable and manageable front-end for facing the public Internet.
Unfortunately, this setup for node.js is not endorsed by all web hosting companies. One hosting company that supports it, even on its inexpensive shared hosting offerings, is A2Hosting.com. They also have a clearly written description of the setup process in their Knowledge Base.
Finally, it's worth noting that the developers of cPanel are working on built-in node.js support. "If all of the stars align we might see this land as soon as version 68," i.e. perhaps early 2018.
References
Apache Virtual Hosting -
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/vhosts/
Apache RewriteRule Directive - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html
A2Hosting.com Knowledge Base Article on Configuring Node.js - https://www.a2hosting.com/kb/installable-applications/manual-installations/installing-node-js-on-managed-hosting-accounts
cPanel Feature Request Thread for node.js Support - https://features.cpanel.net/topic/nodejs-hosting
Related StackOverflow Questions
How to host a Node.Js application in shared hosting
Why node.js can't run on shared hosting?
Yes it's possible, but it has few dependencies which may or may not be supported by either your cpanel hosting provider or the plan you opt in for.
Below steps that I'm mentioning is just for a demo purpose. If you are a student or just want to play with it you can try it out. I'm not a security expert so from security point of view how good it is I really don't know.
So with that being said let's see how I configured it. I have hostinger cpanel hosting subscription and following are the steps:
Enable SSH ACCESS
Connect to shared machine via ssh
Check your linux distro and download & setup node js
In my case following are the commands for that:
Downloading node & extracting it using curl
curl https://nodejs.org/dist/v12.18.3/node-v12.18.3-linux-x64.tar.gz |tar xz
This will download & extract node & create a directory. You can confirm that using ls command as shown in the image below.
At this point you can check the versions as shown below
as you can see for the node command it's okay but for the npm command we have modify it as follows
./node-v12.18.3-linux-x64/bin/node ./node-v12.18.3-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js --version
Further we can create alias to make life little easier
check the below images for that:
I tried using bashrc/bash_profile but somehow it didn't work .
And that's all node server running on a shared cpanel machine.
Now I wanted to have an express js based rest api support in this case. The problem with that is it will be locally hosted on the port I'll give. Check the below example:
var express=require('express')
var app=express()
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.send('hosting node js base express api using php & shared hosting a great way to start yjtools')
})
console.log("listening yjtools node server on port 49876...")
app.listen(49876)
The problem here is even though it will execute I'll not be able to access it over the network. This is because we only get fixed predefined ports (like 80,21,3306 etc.) which are allowed/open on the shared cpanel machine. Due to this the express app I hosted will only available locally on 49876 port.
Let's see what do we have:
An express js based app hosted locally on cpanel machine.
Php based hosted Apache server available over http/https.
So we can make use of php with redirect rule set and curl to bridge the gap.
Following are the changes I did to make it work:
In .htaccess file add a redirect rule, say domain/api is what I want my rest api path to be.
RewriteRule api/(.*)$ api/api.php?request=$1 [QSA,NC,L]
In the api/api.php file (this is the path I choose you can choose any path)
<?php
echo "Hello ".$_REQUEST['username'];
echo '<hr>';
$curl = curl_init('http://127.0.0.1:49976/');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Get the full response
$resp = curl_exec($curl);
if($resp === false) {
//If couldn't connect, try increasing usleep
echo 'Error: ' . curl_error($curl);
} else {
//Split response headers and body
list($head, $body) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $resp, 2);
$headarr = explode("\n", $head);
//Print headers
foreach($headarr as $headval) {
header($headval);
}
//Print body
echo $body;
}
//Close connection
curl_close($curl);
?>
And on the ssh prompt just run the app.js file
node api/app.js
Below are the images for this working in action:
Here is the similar thing which I referred for my program, so we can also make this node call via php itself.
Now I have express based rest api support , angular app hosted and mysql for database everything on cpanel.
You can use any domain pointed to that cPanel server and instead of accessing http://server-ip:8080 try accessing http://domain.tld:8080. By default cPanel does not bind on port 8080. Be sure to check if there is any firewall on the server. If it is, then allow incoming connections on tcp port 8080. Depending on your WHM server configuration, it should also work with http://server-ip:8080
cPanel Version 80 has nodejs 10.x support: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/80Docs/80+Release+Notes#id-80ReleaseNotes-InstallanduseNode.jsapplications
Install and use Node.js applications
You can now install and use Node.js applications on your server. To
use Node.js, install the ea-nodejs10 module in the Additional Packages
section of WHM's EasyApache 4 interface (WHM >> Home >> Software >>
EasyApache 4).
You can register Node.js applications in cPanel's Application Manager
interface (cPanel >> Home >> Software >> Application Manager). For
more information, read our Guide to Node.js Installations
documentation.
For Application Manager to be enabled: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/80Docs/Application+Manager
Your hosting provider must enable the Application Manager feature in
WHM's Feature Manager interface (WHM >> Home >> Packages >> Feature
Manager).
Your hosting provider must install the following Apache modules:
The ea-ruby24-mod_passengermodule. Note: This module disables Apache's
mod_userdir module.
The ea-apache24-mod_env module. Note: This module allows you to add
environment variables when you register your application. For more
information about environment variables, read the Environment
Variables section below.
The ea-nodejs10 module if you want to register a Node.js™ application.
You can see how application manager looks like in this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATxMYzLbRco
anyone who wants to know how to deploy node js app to Cpanel this is a good source for him, this explains thoroughly how to deploy node js app to Cpanel please check this

Nginx and multiple domains

I bought some domains at godaddy.com (i.e mydomain.com) for my droplet at digitalocean.com (i.e 199.216.110.210). I run a nodejs application on port 80 on the droplet. From godaddy.com, I forward with masking mydomain.com to 199.216.110.210 and I could see may app.
Now I want to run on 199.216.110.210 several node applications on different ports, using ngnix as reverse proxy. I followed the instructions here (www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-host-multiple-node-js-applications-on-a-single-vps-with-nginx-forever-and-crontab).
My nginx .conf file is
server {
listen 80;
server_name mydomain.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
# same as in the link above
}
}
(and I am sure it is read: when ngnix start if I put an error there, ngnix reports it).
I start the nodejs application on port 3000:
I try mydomain.com, but ngnix shows always the welcome page.
Also doing mydomain.com: 3000 does not work,
it works only with 199.216.110.210:3000.
From godaddy.com, if I forward with masking the mydomain.com to 199.216.110.210:3000 I can see may app.
But I do not like this solution. I would like domains pointing to my droplet, without specifing the port and admin them with nginx.
How can I get a domain name to use with ngnix as reverse proxy to select my apps, mapped on different domains on different ports? I suppose that forwarding from godaddy.com is somehow limited.
In your server go to /var/log/nginx and do a tail -F *log. Now in another shell restart nginx.
I suspect that your domain name is too long and nginx will complain about its hash_bucket_size is too small. If this is the case open /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and make sure that the line
server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
exists, has a value of 64 and is uncommented. Then do sudo service nginx reload, and check if all works as expected.
I am going to detail step by step how I am able to do it in my aws ec2 instance;
I set up a DNS record to my instance, so i can set mydomain.com to 192.168.123.123 (my specific IP).
Inside my instance I have forever running my node.js app in port 3000 (I test it work by issuing curl localhost:3000 from the command line)
I then download this .sh file in order to properly intantiate nginx; curl -o nginxStarter.sh https://gist.githubusercontent.com/renatoargh/dda1fbc854f7957ec7b3/raw/c0bc1a1ec76e50cdb4336182c53a0b222edb6c0e/start.sh
I configure nginx with this configuration file. Put this file in; /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Start nginx with this command; sudo sh nginxStarter.sh start
PS.: For multiple apps just replicate the lines that routes the requests to specific ports, very easy...! If not needed you can eliminate lines regarding out SSL.

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