I have 5 domains pointing to the same machine, let's say these domains are:
example1.com
example2.com
example3.com
example4.com
example5.com
My server has a virtual host file managed by apache, which controls these 5 domains.
I have a node.js app running on port 3000.
If I connect to any of the 5 domains, and type :3000 at the end, I can see the node.js app splash screen.
For example, if I connect to example1.com:3000 it serves me the same page (the node.js app) that can be reached by connecting to example2.com:3000 and example3.com:3000, etc. I understand why this is happening.
However, I am trying to edit my configuration such that the following criteria are met:
Users can only connect to the node app when they type in example5.com, and not any of the other domains.
Users do not have to type in the port number, example5.com:3000, when trying to reach the node app.
I have searched and found some information which leads me to believe this is normally achieved by setting up a reverse proxy, but most examples I find are using nginx or node. It would be nice to figure out a reverse proxy solution with apache so I don't have to re-write all my virtual host logic with node or nginx.
You need to set up a reverse proxy. An easy way to do this is to use nginx. Install and start nginx and in your config file put the following:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example1.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
}
}
And then run your node server on port 3000.
Related
I'm working on a Linux VM on Azure which was set up by someone else (so I don't know all the details). I'm trying to connect it to a domain name.
The server has a "Hello World" program, so when I go to "example.com" I should be seeing "Hello World". Currently I'm just getting
Safari can't open the page "http://example.com" because Safari can't find the server "my domain.com"
I thought I'd start with making sure that the IP address connects to the server (which it did at one point. So I enter the IP address of the server (let's say it's "12.345.678.901") in the browser, and it can't connect... I get the error
Can't open the page "12.345.678.901" because the server where this page is located isn't responding
There's an Inbound port rule to allow connections for port 8080, so I tried "12.345.678.901:8080" but this time got
Can't open the page "12.345.678.901:8080" because Safari can't connect to the server
I don't know what to try next. Presumably something needs to be enabled on the server to allow the browser to connect?
The other inbound port rules are ssh on port 22 (TCP) and then what I assume are the standard Azure ones (I can't edit or delete them anyway).
To view your Linux VM inside the browser, you need to install a web server. Easiest to install and get working straight away is nginx.
First thing you need to do is SSH(port 22) into your VM using the username and IP address of the machine:
ssh username#ipaddress
Which will prompt you to enter a passphrase to gain access to the VM.
This also assumes your SSH public key exists inside ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the VM. If you don't have this setup then you need to get the owner of the VM to copy your public key into this file. Otherwise you won't be able to connect and get a Permission denied (publickey) error.
Assuming the above works, you can install the nginx webserver with the following two commands:
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install nginx
Then once this web server is installed, add an HTTP inbound port 80 rule inside the network settings. For security reasons, having your web server listen on this port is probably unsecure long term. Its just easier to get working when you choose this port to begin with, because its the default.
You can see what the default listening port by viewing the server configuration host file with cat /etc/nginx/sites-available/default:
#server {
# listen 80;
# listen [::]:80;
#
# server_name example.com;
#
# root /var/www/example.com;
# index index.html;
#
# location / {
# try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
# }
#}
Which shows the default port of 80. You can change this default port to 8080, then run sudo service nginx restart to restart the server and apply the changes. Additionally, you can have a look at this How to make Nginx Server Listen on Multiple Ports tutorial, which goes into more depth on how to configure listening ports for nginx webservers.
You should then be able to view your VM from a browser window(blurred out my IP address for security reasons):
You can also have a look at this Quickstart: Create a Linux virtual machine in the Azure portal tutorial for a step by step on how to get this setup in Azure.
You should first check to see if you have an entry for http://example.com. The reason could be that you do not have a DNS Entry and when you are trying to connect to it via the browser. Since you tried connecting to it via IP and it still did not work, I would suggest you check your Webserver configurations to make sure it is correctly listening for port 8080. Also, ensure that your webserver is also turned on as well. You can tail the webserver log and try to hit it via the IP like you did earlier and see if you see any errors in the logs. It would at least tell you if your request you are making on your browser is actually getting to the webserver.
I have a published site that uses HTTPS. The site needs to communicates with a HTTP node Express API. The API is run on my local machine. Everything worked fine until I switched the client application to use HTTPS. Now I receive mixed content warnings. I have been reading about reverse proxys and wonder if this could be the solution to my problem. Is it possible to proxy a request to my localhost? Or will localhost point to the server the proxy is on?
I have been looking at using nginx as the reverse proxy server but I have zero experience with proxys and not positive how to go about it.
I am mainly wondering if it is possible or not before I dig any deeper.
Yes, this is a pretty standard use case for using nginx (or any other reverse proxy). You would configure the location prefixes, etc that need to go to your backend application and proxy (via proxy_pass directive) to them. Any static content can be served directly from nginx. All of this can then behind nginx.
Assuming that your application is never issuing absolute urls which make use of "http://" this should resolve your mixed content warnings.
You will probably want to read some tutorials but the basics of your configuration would be:
server {
listen 443 ssl; # you can also add http2
server_name hostnames that you listen for;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/cert.key;
ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;
root /var/www/sites/foo.com;
location /path/handled/by/application {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; # or whatever port is
}
}
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 recently installed a nodejs app (keystone) app in my home/myusername/myappname directory.
When I visit www.mydomain.com, nothing displays - even after turning on my nodejs app.
Where should these files be?
I am running ubuntu 16.04.
In the past I have worked with a var/www folder, but I am not using apache - do I need to manually create this folder?
Thanks!
For your app to be visible it has to be running (obviously) and accessible on port 80 (if you want it to be available without adding a port number to the URL).
It doesn't matter where it is on the disk as long as it's running.
You don't need Apache or nginx or any other server. Your Node app may listen on port 80. But alternatively it can listen on some other port and your other server (Apache, nginx, etc.) can proxy the requests to that port.
But if your app is listening on, e.g. port 3000 then you should be able to access it as http://www.example.com:3000/.
Also, make sure that your domain is configured correctly. It's A record for IPv4 (or AAAA for IPv6) of the www subdomain should be equal to the publicly accessible IP address of your server.
And make sure that the port you use is not blocked by the firewall.
Update
To see how you can set the port with Keystone, see:
http://keystonejs.com/docs/configuration/#options-server
It can be either changed in the config or you can run your app with:
PORT=80 node yourApp.js
instead of:
node yourApp.js
but keep in mind that to use the port number below 1024 you will usually need the program to run as root (or add a special privilege which is more complicated).
It will also mean that this will be the only application that you can run on this server, even if you have more domain names.
If you don't want to run as root or you want to host more application, it is easiest to install nginx and proxy the requests. Such a configuration is called a "reverse proxy" - it's good to search for info and tutorials using that phrase.
The simplest nginx config would be something like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.example.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
}
}
You can set it in:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/default
or in a different file as e.g.:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/example
and then symlinked as /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example
You need to restart nginx after changing the config.
You can find more options on configuring reverse proxies here:
https://www.nginx.com/resources/admin-guide/reverse-proxy/
You need to make a proxy between Apache and your Node.js application because Node.js has a built-in server. Supose your Node.js app is served on 9000 port. Then you need to make a proxy to redirect all trafic in 80 port to 9000 port where the Node.js app is running.
1. Enable mod_proxy
You can do this through a2enmond.
sudo a2enmod proxy
sudo a2enmod proxy_http
2. Set the proxy
Edit the /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf file and add the following lines:
ProxyRequests Off
Order deny, allow from All
ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:9000 ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:9000
This basically say: "Redirect all traffic from root / to http://0.0.0.0:9000. The host 0.0.0.0:9000 is where your app is running.
Finally restart apache to enable changes.
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.