My server is running on a Node.js environment with Express. My server works fine, but I can't remove the port at the end of the domain name from the URL.
What is the right way to access my app with an URL without port at the end ?
Client side
By default, the port is 80 when a browser make an HTTP request.
If you type localhost, the real request is localhost:80 because no port is specified. It will be the same with any domain name. If you type example.com, the real request is example.com:80.
It is the client (here the browser) which choose on which port it will make his request to the server.
You can force your browser to emit a request on any port by adding :port_number after the domain name, as localhost:3000 or example.com:3000. Here we change the port from 80 to 3000.
Server side
The web server chooses on which port it listens for requests. It can be 80, 3000 or any other port.
If a client makes an HTTP request, your web server needs to listen to the right port. If the client emits example.com:4000, your web server must listen on port 4000 to get and process the request.
To make a web server, you can use Node.js, Apache (used in LAMP), Nginx etc. You can have multiple web servers running on your system and each of them can use multiple ports, but you can't make them listen on the same port. One of your web server may not start or could take the lead on others or crash...
Solutions are to use only one web server or to use multiple web server on different ports. In your situation, you are using LAMP so Apache web server. Its probably running on port 80 in his configuration. In this case you can't run a Node web server on port 80 because it's already in use. You should choose another port like 3000 for example. Both Node and Apache will then run on your system but on different ports respectively 3000 and 80.
In this last situation, you can access directly to Apache, but not to Node without precise the port 3000. To be able to access Node web server by port 80 without stopping Apache, you need to go through Apache and to make it redirect requests to your Node server in some cases. To do that, you need to configurate a proxy in your Apache. Note that it would be the same if you was using Nginx or other web servers.
Example
Let's take a simple express server on port 3000 :
// server.js
var express = require('express'),
app = express(),
http = require('http').createServer(app),
port = 3000;
app.get('*', function (req, res, next) { res.sendFile(__dirname + '/views/index.html'); });
http.listen(port, function () { console.log('App running & listening on port ' + port); });
If you type in the terminal node server.js, you can access from browser by localhost:3000, but you can't access by localhost because no web server is running on port 80.
If you change port variable to 80, you can access from browser by localhost or localhost:80, but not by localhost:3000 anymore.
If you edit /etc/hosts (sudo nano /etc/hosts) with a new line 127.0.0.1 example.com, you can access from browser by example.com if port is 80, else example.com:port_number like example.com:3000. This third solution maps domain name to ip address in your local client only.
If the chosen port, 80 for example, is already in use by another process (as LAMP), your node server may not works. In this case you should close this other process first or choose another port for your node process. In the third example, if you close the LAMP first, you can access from browser by example.com, if you choose another port for Node, you can access from browser by example.com:port_number like example.com:3000 for Node and still access your LAMP server on port 80.
Don't forget that 80 is the default port used by the browser if no port is specified. If you use another port, you should precise it from the browser by adding :port_number after your domain.
Now if you own a real domain name you will need to make a real DNS mapping not juts edit /etc/hosts. Configure your DNS on your registar account (where you bought your domain name) to make it point to your server's IP. Like that, when a client make an HTTP request to the domain name, it will be redirected to your server.
To have both Apache and Node.js running and available on port 80, you should make a proxy as explain above. Indeed, for you the problem is probably that you have a web server already running on port 80 (Apache with LAMP) and you want also your Node.js app to run on port 80 to don't force clients to precise the port at the end of the url. To fix that, you need to make a proxy in Apache conf to redirect requests which come from the specific domain name to your localhost node server process on the right port.
Something like that in your apache conf :
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyVia Full
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
</VirtualHost>
Here when a request arrive on your server on port 80, Apache will check if it comes from example.com and if it is, it will redirect to 127.0.0.1:3000 where your node server will take the lead. The two different process (Apache & Node) should run in the same time on your server on different port.
If you want to run your node js server without any port and simply by http://localhost then listen your express js server on port 80 .
You could either do as stated by the previous answers and run on port 80 OR
you could keep the server running on whatever port you want and setup a proxy server such as nginx and forward the HTTP requests to said server.
This could be helpful in case you want to spin up multiple instances or even different processes.
When you see a URL, without a port, it means one of two ports are being served:
https:// - port 443
http:// - port 80
Even assuming the port is not in use, you can't service directly to port 80 without superuser privileges because port 80 and port 443 are privileged ports.
If you want to test the server running on port 80 directly:
sudo node index.js
Where index.js is the name of your Express application.
Keeping it running
Because you tagged apache, I'm assuming you want to know how to set up a node server using Apache. If you don't need a production quality server and just want to keep it running all the time, you can do that too.
Dev/Just keep it running
You can daemonize your server. A quick look for a "node" solution exposes forever as a way to do that. Simply install and run like this:
yarn global add forever
# or
# npm i -g forever
# remember, sudo for port 80
sudo forever start index.js
Production/Apache
Use a non-privileged port for Node, and set up a proxy in Apache. Something like:
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8000
If you set the port to 8000. Put that in a <VirtualHost>. Examples here. Likely you would still want to daemonize your nodejs Application using forever or some similar daemon tool (systemd is great for Linux services)
I've managed to get Node and NPM installed on my shared hosting account with Namecheap by following this answer. It all seems to be working, I can launch my app and it stays launched, but the subdomain which points to app's root route just shows up the folder of the domain.
I've tried going to myaddress.com/subdomain:8080 but I get a server error plus a 404. I've also tried changing Node's listening port from 8080 to 80, but on 80 I get an error:
Error: listen EACCES 0.0.0.0:80
So that means I don't have rights to port 80. How can I get clients to connect port 8080?
This is the part that shared hosting has a problem with, they wont open any ports for you. This is exactly where your workaround needs to be centered. Im currently looking for solutions to either use php to serve a node
see here https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-php-server
and here How to host a Node.Js application in shared hosting
or just configuring express to use somehow port 80.
These would be your best options.
Im running my node app with grunt on a DO droplet. I start the server
Running "connect:server" (connect) task
Waiting forever...
Started connect web server on http://localhost:3000
But when I navigate to my dropletIP:3000 I cannot see the app, I get:
This site can’t be reached
mydropletIP refused to connect.
Shouldn't my app be available? I don't have nginx or anything installed.
I was having similar problem but the solution was simple. Change from 'localhost' to '0.0.0.0' i.e
.listen(8080, '0.0.0.0');
And then to test your api just enter your static ip of droplet with port that you have entered i.e droplet-ip:8080
Check the particular port is opened or not ,using following command
sudo ufw status
If any Firewall enabled and any port is block means you can see that.
netstat -an | grep "LISTEN " ( List of listening port on server)
I need this info ,then only we can find a problem
I'm trying to access a node proxy server running on my local machine from somewhere else(specified later). I've tried setting proxy listening domain to 0.0.0.0 with with port 8888. The file that will send request to the proxy server is hosted using a simpleHttpServer at 127.0.0.1 with port 4444 on another computer. In this file, I'm sending the request to http://my_local_ip:8888 (I'm assuming this is where the Node Proxy lives on my computer). However, I'm get connection timeout for some reason. Does anyone see problems with this approach?
I have installed Node.js with Socket.io on a CentOS server which is running Apache on port 80.
I created a socket test, which justs listens on port 8080.
If I curl the address localhost:8080 from within the server's shell, I get the Socket.io-welcome message. If I have a line like this:
<script src="http://localhost:8080/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>
Then the browser cannot find the file.
A "solution" was to proxy requests to /nodejs/ to http://localhost:8080/, but this solution did not work for very long.
Is it possible to run the Node.js server when we have Apache installed? Which settings must be changed in order for us to access the url: http://server.com:8080 ? It seems the Node.js only accepts connections from localhost.
Problem is most probably in your node.js program.
It should listen on 0.0.0.0 and not 127.0.0.1 which is local only.
So where you've got something like:
.listen(8080, '127.0.0.1'); // '127.0.0.1' or 'localhost'
You should change it to:
.listen(8080); // or 0.0.0.0
Apache will only interfere if it also uses port 8080 but you should get an error when starting your node app if this is the case.
Also, if you connect to http://localhost in your browser, it will only work if the server is on the same local machine as the browser. Fine for testing I guess.
You'll have to connect to a domain or ip address if you have a hosted server else no browser will find it.
Update:
Your socket.io code also needs to connect correctly:
var socket = io.connect('http://correct.server.com:8080'); // not localhost
and your browser needs to load the javascript file from the correct place:
<script src="http://correct.server.com/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script> // not localhost
This might help with firewall / load balancer issues:
https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO-and-firewall-software