I have a website under domain (say example.com) which is hosted on Amazon Web Services EC 2 instance which has Apache already installed and ready to run on port 80.Now I wish to transfer from Apache to node JS (where Node JS runs on another port, say 8001).How to change the HTTP port address of EC 2 say that when i go to that URL (example.com) it should run on node JS instead of Apache (While for temporary,node JS runs on example.com:8001).
How is it possible and Kindly help?
So you cannot direct a standard web address (e.g. www.example.com) to anything other than port 80. By default http is on port 80 and https is on port 443. You can override that default by explicitly giving the port but you cannot change that default.
So your options are:
Replace Apache with Node on port 80. This will involve shutting down Apache (and making sure it doesn't auto restart on reboot), and changing your node port to port 80. This also will probably require running your node service as root (as port 80 is usually protected) and this is not recommended (Apache starts as root to get the port but then usually immediately switches to non-root user).
Have Apache proxy forward requests to Node. This means Apache is still your main webserver and listens on port 80 but certain requests are sent on to Node.
This second option could be done using mod_proxy with config like this:
ProxyPass "/foo" "http://localhost:8001/"
ProxyPassReverse "/foo" "http://localhost:8001/"
It all depends on what you want to use your set up for and making best use of the software available to you.
Typical set up is a multi-layered approach involving one or more of these:
LoadBalancer (optional for high load sites or where resiliency is key)
Webserver
Appserver
Database
Yes you could use just Node for all of these layers. However, to me, it is more an application server than a webserver.
A webserver like Apache or Nginx is specifically designed to act like a web server, and by that I mean serving static pages and doing other top layer stuff. They have several features built up over their years to provide speed and security. Now nearly everything they can do, can be done in Node but not quite as easily and not by standard and often requires pulling in 3rd party modules.
A webserver then typically offloads dynamic work to other programs. This could be scripts (PHP or Perl), or separate app servers like Tomcat, Jboss or Node. These are typically very good at specific tasks (e.g. talking to database and generating dynamic pages) but less good at severing static pages quickly.
The beauty of node to me is for micro- services, where you can have lots of independent, but potentially interlinked, node services which are all lightweight and good at one task and the web server is still needed in front of them. This compares to a bulky multi-tasking J2EE server like Tomcat or Jboss that you would use in the past which tried to do every dynamic app under one process (though admittedly often under separate WAR files).
So, without knowing your full use case, I would suggest Apache and Node instead of Node replacing Apache.
Related
sorry if this is a wrong question on this forum but I am simply just stuck and need some advice. I have a shared hosting service and a cloud based hosting server with node.js installed. I want to host my website as normal but I also want to add real time chat and location tracking using node.js I am confused with what I am reading in several places because node.js is itself a server but not designed to host websites? So I have to run 2 different servers? One for the website and one to run node.js? When I setup the cloud one with a node.js script running I can no longer access the webpages.
Whats the best way for me achieve this as I am just going round in circles. Also is there a way I can set up a server on my PC and run and test both of these together before hand so I see what is needed and get it working as it will stop me ordering servers I dont need.
Many thanks for any help or advice.
Node can serve webpages using a framework like Express, but can cause conflicts if run on the same port as another webserver program (Apache, etc). One solution could be to serve your webpages through your webserver on port 80 (or 443 for HTTPS) and run your node server on a different port in order to send information back and forth.
There are a number of ways you can achieve this but here is one popular approach.
You can use NGINX as your front facing web server and proxy the requests to your backend Node service.
In NGINX, for example, you will configure your upstream service as follows:
upstream lucyservice {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
keepalive 64;
}
The 8000 you see above is just an example, you may be running your Node service on a different port.
Further in your config (in the server config section) you will proxy the requests to your service as follows:
location / {
proxy_pass http://lucyservice;
}
You're Node service can be running in a process manager like forever / pm2 etc. You can have multiple Node services running in a cluster depending on how many processors your machine has etc.
So to recap - your front facing web server will be handling all traffic on port 80 (HTTP) and or 443 (HTTPS) and this will proxy the requests to your Node service running on whatever port(s) you define. All of this can happen on one single server or multiple if you need / desire.
I am trying to have multiple tomcat instances on a Linux server and each instance would have an web application ROOT deployed in it.
While accessing the application, the url is formed in the format : whereas I don't want the end users to remember the ip address or the port of the application.
Since more than one instances would be used in the linux server, defaulting to 80 port ( http ) and 443 ( https ) wouldn't help out.
The idea is to expose the DNS name for the application and looks like Apache HTTP server would help me solve the case. Is the approach right ?
I assume the apache server should be one per linux server vs one per tomcat instance. Could this be confirmed ?
The Apache Tomcat version is 8.5.4 and the plan is to go with the apache http server version 2.4
Setting an Apache HTTPD (or any other) as front server is a good approach.
You won't be able to use more than one Apache HTTPD per server, since you don't want to use :port notation in the url's, at least it will not be possible to use standard HTTP/HTTPS ports in more than one HTTPD at once at the same server.
If you plan to use both http and https, you should create at least one virtual host for each of them. There is a limitation on creating virtual hosts for name based virtual host while using SSL 443 port, so if you want to have more than one HTTPS port enabled you will need IP based virtual hosting.
This is the Apache HTTPD 2.4 virtual host documentation.
Then, you could forward requests to each Tomcat using mod_proxy or tomcat connector. I personally choose one or other depending on the current requirements, specially if there is straight correspondence between contexts in Tomcat and Apache HTTPD (in this case I use AJP) or there's the need to rewrite it (mod_rewrite):
httpd://apache.httpd/context1 -> tomcat:XXXX/context1 (ajp tomcat connector)
httpd://apache.httpd/ -> tomcat:XXXX/context2 (mod_rewrite)
httpd://apache.httpd/context3 -> tomcat:XXXX/context4 (mod_rewrite)
I have a server running webmin (different domains pointing to different app/directories). Currently I can have my php app running from a directory and all I need to do in order to make it live is get webmin to direct that domain to that specific directory.
Can I do the same with a node js app? If not, how can I use node and webmin in the same box?
I know you didn't say this specifically, but assuming you're hosting the other web stuff through, say, Apache, you would need to leverage that, but you can probably get the effect you want. Basically, it sounds like you want to be able to use "host header" separation for services, rather than having a separate IP address for, say, Apache and Node.js to each use.
So, if you let Apache bind to the main port you're using (80/443/both), then you would run ode and have it configured to listen on a different port (say 8080 as in the example you left in another comment). You can then use mod_proxy in Apache and have it route request with certain domain names to Node. Here's a: more concrete example of this but really the idea is not specific to Node. It can apply to any other process that wants to respond to HTTP requests on your server (or even on a different server).
I have a Linode VPS, currently running lighttpd to serve up my PHP websites and listening on port 80.
I'm also running Node.js, which listens on port 81, and uses websockets and HTTP to interact with the client.
There's a couple of different domains that I would like to point to this server. Ideally, I would like the domains which host the PHP sites to all talk to the same lighttpd server, and the sites which use node.js would somehow redirect to the port node.js is listening on unbeknownst to the client (e.g. no 30x redirect).
example-php1.com:80 -> linodebox:80 lighttpd /var/www/example1
example-php2.com:80 -> linodebox:80 lighttpd /var/www/example2
example-node.com:80 -> linodebox:81 node.js
Is there a way to do this, either by setting DNS entries or tweaking iptables? Does lighttpd need to be a proxy for node.js? The websockets feature needs to work without any fallbacks, and visiting a non node domain, e.g. example-php1.com:81, should not expose the node application.
I feel the perfect solution wouldn't require changes to existing application code nor require proxying between software web servers, but I could be wrong.
What's up Tom!?
I recommend HA-Proxy, it's one of the most high performance proxies out there and should accomplish what you're trying to do there.
I'm doing something similar with nginx acting as a proxy, it's easy but not the fastest.
HA-Proxy's website is here http://haproxy.1wt.eu
If you wanted a 'pure' solution, you could probably get the answer from looking at ha-proxy's source code. You can't really do it with iptables. Something has to read the HTTP header to determine where the request came from to route it locally.
I had basically the same problem and I ended up using node-http-proxy (also available in npm as http-proxy).
You just need a simple config file:
{
router: {
'example-php1.com': 'linodebox:80',
'example-php2.com': 'linodebox:80',
'example-node.com': 'linodebox:81
}
}
Then just run node-http-proxy --config options.json and you're set. If you want to run lighttpd and node on the same machine, you'll have to start lighttpd on a different port (I use 81 for php and 3000 for node - adjusting the config is easy). I also use forever to manage my node instances.
Ya'll are gonna hate me...
I ended up going with a second IP address, then followed the Linode tutorial to setup multiple static IPs. Then, I configured lighttpd to bind to one IP address and Node.js to bind to another IP address.
This isn't a great solution as it doesn't scale.
Update: lighttpd 1.4.46 (released back in 2017) added multiple ways to accept WebSocket connections:
lighttpd mod_wstunnel
lighttpd mod_proxy
lighttpd mod_cgi
Please pardon my ignorance on node.js. I have started reading on node.js and have some perception which might be wrong. So needed it to clarify
When we use createServer() method, does it creates a virtual server. Not sure whether the term "virtual" is appropriate, but it's the best I can describe it :)
I am confused that how should I deploy my application having node.js + other custom js files as a part of it. If I deploy my application in the main server, does that mean I have two servers?
Thanks for bearing with me.
I will try to answer that:
Q1:
createServer basically creates a process which listens on the specified port for the requests. So yes you can call it as a virtual server which constantly listens for request at the port.
Q2:
Yes you can say that it has now 2 servers
For eg: you server had apache initially which listens to port 80 (you can access it as http://example.com/ it by default looks for port 80)
and then you also start the node service listening on some other port for eg: port 8456 (you can access it as http://example.com:8456/ which will look for port 8456)
So yes you can there are two servers.
EDIT
Q: So what would be the difference if the page is served by the physical server and the virtual server created by node.js?
Physical Server and Node Server are 2 different things and there is no way a single request is going to both the servers.
For eg:
I use apache server to host my website running on PHP. It serves all the html contents of my website (which involves connecting to mysql for data).
Some of the requests could be:
http://example.com/reports.php
http://example.com/search.php
At the other end I might be using nodejs server for totally another purpose. For eg: I might use it for an API, which returns JSON/XML in return. I can use this API myself for some dynamic contents by making AJAX calls with javascript or simple CURL commands from PHP. Or I might also make this API available to public.
Some of the requests could be:
http://example.com:8456/getList?apikey=¶m1=¶m2=
My choice for NodeJs Server used as an API would be for its ability to handle concurrent request and since its asynchronous for file operations it will be much faster than PHP.
In this case I have a website which is not only working on PHP but its the combination of 2 different technologies (PHP on Apache and Nodejs) and hence 2 servers are totally different running on same server but have there own execution space.
Third Question:
So what would be the difference if the page is served by the physical server and the virtual server created by node.js?
If I might add, it's a virtual server in the sense that apache is an virtual http server listening on whatever port. Of course apache had a lot more modules and plugins and configurations to it where as Node's is lighter (kind of like WEBrick for rails), non-blocking and agile for building on. Then again apache is more stable.. in other words, it's a decision of software, both sitting on the server listening to a particular port set by you.
That said there's deployment methods that allow you to place a node application in front of software such as nginx (another server-side software) or HAproxy (load handling with a lot of power), so really it's all up to how you choose to configure it.
Maybe I'm getting to far from your question, but I hope this helps!
Also, You should give the answer to the other guy, he came first ;)