I'm working for a small company on something like a new PHP environment for future projects. I'd like to cram in as much modernization and automization as possible (while I can).
The thing is, I always come across solutions that require Node.js (Grunt, Autoprefixer, ...). None of our customer's hosting providers support Node.js (not even our own managed server). Most of the time I don't even have shell access.
I come across npm this and npm that so often, almost as if it's some always available quasistandard. Do I have some misunderstanding here – or is this simply only usable by people hosting their projects on their own servers? Am I just out of luck if I have to support a wide range of (sometimes questionable) shared hosting providers?
Comparing most PHP applications and most Node.js applications is apples and oranges.
Most PHP applications are fairly self-contained and intended to be used with web servers and a mostly stock PHP configuration. Most Node.js applications have a ton of NPM dependencies that need to be installed, and while HTTP is used to connect between the web server and the Node.js application, it isn't always clear what port that will be on. Plus, the Node.js application may require extra configuration, command line parameters, etc. Some hosting for Node.js is smart enough to look at the package.json file (Elastic Beanstalk for example) and figure out how to start your Node.js application.
These days you will find PHP going the same way. A lot of software is built with Composer packages that must be set up and installed. You won't find many folks getting that working on shared hosting either. Many Node.js applications have nothing to do with the web or web servers. That is increasingly becoming the case with PHP as well, but you won't find shared hosting for PHP applications.
Basically, you're looking at two entirely different ecosystems.
I think that your company needs to realize that you're sacrificing an awful lot just to stay compatible with cheap crappy shared hosting. These days you can get a $5/mo. VPS to run whatever you want, and that's often the same price as your shared hosting. Why waste time and resources while building a substandard application if you can pay $10 more a year and do what you want/need to do?
Use the technologies that you need to get the job done. If what you can do works fine in a normal PHP web application framework, then use that. If you need to build a persistent server application and feel that Node.js is right for you, use that.
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I am kinda old school and the first programming language for web I saw was PHP, and everybody uses it with Apache. At that time, I also knew ASP, which were used along with Microsoft IIS and, later, ASP.NET, that runs over IIS, as well.
The time passed, I went to the ERP world and, when I came back (few months ago), I knew Golang and Node.js and for my surprise they have their own web servers.
I can see many advantages in the builtin web servers, but, every application needs to rewrite their web server rules (I faced that recently when I needed to setup a HTTPS server using Express.js).
After some hard work to understand all the nuances of the HTTP protocol, I asked myself: and if I am doing it in the wrong way? If all the permissive rules that I created in my dev server go to production? Maybe this is an useless concern. But maybe I am creating a fragile server that could be exploited by a naive hacker.
Using a server like Apache it is harder to misuse security rules, because there are settings for development and production environments that are explicit. If the rules are hardcoded (as they are in Node or Go), an unaware developer can use development rules in production and nobody is going to see it before the stuff happens.
Any thoughts?
web server focuses on the speed capacity and the caculating capacity. No matter how good java or php web is or how many old companies put them in use, as long as a new language can provides a faster speed and better capacity such as go, more programmer would go for it.
by the way, to run a web server in go is really such an easy thing.It's faster building and slightly running.And the routine in go helps the web server beter serves milions of client requests,Which old web language can hardly do it.
You can still use nginx or apache in front of your golang gateway for many reasons including tls termination.
But service to service communication might be nice to communicate directly to services and the golang http webserver is fast. It also supports http2 out of the box. Go leverages its "goroutines" to reduce overhead from the os to handle many requests at once.
Node.js and Golang do not have their web server, these are just some lib packages implement http-protocols and open some ports to provide services.
Like Spring web.
Nginx/IIS/Apache are true server, web server just a component of them.
I think Spring should meet the full application scenarios, include /gateway/security/route/package/runtime manage/ and so on.
But when we has some different language platform, then we need nginx/apache/spring gateway/zuul/or others to route them.
I currently have a website where I need to use node.js, I am not able to use node.js however, because the web host does not support it. What is the best way I go about hosting a server without having to completely change hosts?
[…] without having to completely change hosts?
If your current hosting provider doesn't support nodejs and you want to use nodejs, then you have to change hosting provider. Sorry.
I can recommend Google Cloud Engine. You can create a virtual machine, e.g. running Fedora, access it via SSH and install what you need, i.e. apache2, nodejs, etc.
If you're not comfortable with that, you should go for a managed hosting solution instead. It will probably be a little more expensive, and you'll have less flexibility in what programs you can use (since you share your virtual machine with other customers and can't make changes to the system yourself), but on the upside, most of the setup is done for you. There are many providers you can choose from; google "managed hostinig with nodejs" if you want an overview. I have used 1and1 before and was mostly happy with it. As you can see here, they have nodejs installed on their servers.
Your question makes hardly any sense... but
Heroku is really great for Node.js app hosting
I just created a simple web app using the MEAN stack, and I want to host it online somewhere (I'm brand new to the MEAN stack). I have done this with static pages (using only HTML and CSS) using other sites such as BitBalloon, but since this is my first deploy with the MEAN stack, I really don't know how to get it online. I'd prefer using a free service for now since I just want to test my app, and share it with friends. For example, BitBalloon will give you an address like http://stoker-neutrons-12345.bitballoon.com/, which is perfect for testing your app, and sharing it with others. Is there a similar method/hosting site available for apps built on the MEAN stack?
This question will probably be closed quickly for being a "recommendation question", which doesn't fit SO's target, but still, here are two recommendations:
RedHat OpenShift provides a free tier with plenty of functionality.
Heroku's "free" package might also work if you're just testing. However, your container will go to "sleep" after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Be prepared, that both options require some effort on getting things rolling (steps are different than simply FTPing some files). But at least Heroku provides some quick start instructions (RedHat probably too, but I haven't checked)
I've been reading up on a few node tutorials but there are a couple of best/common practices that I would like to ask about for those out there that have built real node apps before.
Who do you run the node application as on your linux box? None of the tutorials I've read mention anything about adding a node user and group so I'm curious if it's because they just neglect to mention it or because they do something else.
Where do you keep your projects? '/home/'? '/var/'?
Do you typically put something in front of your node app? Such as nginx or haproxy?
Do you run other resources, such as storage(redis, mongo, mysql, ...), mq, etc..., on the same machine or separate machines?
I am guessing this question is mostly about setting up your online server and not your local development machine.
In the irc channel somebody answered the same question and said that he uses a separate user for each application. So I am guessing that this is a good common practice.
I mostly do /home/user/apps
I see a lot of nginx examples so I am guessing that is what most people use. I have a server with varnish in front of the a node.js application and that works well and was easy to setup. There are some pure node.js solutions but for something as important as your reversed proxy I would go for something that is a little more battle-tested.
To answer this correctly you probably have to ask your self. What are my resources? Can I afford many small servers? How important is your application? Will you lose money if your app goes down?
If you run a full stack on lets say one VPS then if there is a problem with that VPS then only one of your apps is affected.
In terms of maintenance having for example one database server for multiple apps might seem attractive. You could reason that if you need to update your database to patch a security hole you only need to do it in one place. On the other hand you now have a single point of failure for all the apps depending on that database server.
I personally went for many full stack server and I am learning how to automate deployment and maintenance. Tools like Puppet and Chef seem to be really helpful for this.
I only owned my own Linux servers for the last 3 months and have been a Linux user for 1.5 years. So before setting up a server park based on these answers make sure you do some additional research.
Here's what I think:
Using separate user for each app is the way I'm doing this.
I keep it in /home/user/ to make sure that only user (and root of course) has access to the app.
Some time ago I've created my own reverse proxy in Node JS based on node-http-proxy module. If you don't want to use reverse proxy then there's no point in putting anything in front of Node. There's even more: it may harm the app, since for example nginx can't use HTTP/1.1 (at least at the moment).
All resources I run on the same machine. Only when I actually need to distribute my app between separate machines I start thinking about seperate machines. There's no need to preoptimize. App's code is a different thing, though.
Visit the following links::
nettuts
nodetuts
lynda nodejs tutorials
Best practice seems to be to use the same user/group as you would for Apache or a similar web server.
On Debian, that is www-data:www-data
However, that can be problematic with some applications that might require higher permissions. For example, I've been trying to write something similar to Webmin using Node and this requires root permissions (or at least adm group) for a number of tasks.
On Debian, I use /var/nodejs (I use /var/www for "normal" web applications such as PHP)
One of the reasons I'm still reluctant to use Node (apart from the appalling lack of good quality documentation) is the need to assign multiple IP Ports when running multiple applications. I think that for any reasonably sized production environment you would use virtual servers to partition out the Node server processes.
One thing that Node developers seem to often forget is that, in many enterprise environments, IP ports are very tightly controlled. Getting a new port opened through the firewall is a very painful and time-consuming task.
The other thing to remember if you are using a reverse proxy is that web apps often fail when run from behind a proxy - especially if mapping a virtual folder (e.g. https://extdomain/folder -> http://localhost:1234), you need to keep testing.
I'm just running a single VPS for my own systems. However, for a production app, you would need to understand the requirements. Production apps would be very likely to need multiple servers if only for resilience and scalability.
Every LAMP or XAMPP writeup or tutorial I see says "Not for production use", so what do I use for production?
you use apache, php and mysql installed as they should be for production. xampp is all those things in one package with basically no set up security .. root passwords are empty .. users are well known .. but the components are the same as the ones you would use if you downloaded them each ..
The XAMPP philosophy says:
The philosophy behind XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on.
The default configuration is not good from a securtiy point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such environment.
So it’s primarily designated as a development environment and not as a production environment.
Given the right installation options, you can use them as a starting point for a production server. But there are some holes to fill in, mainly wrt security. The disclaimers you refer to are (wisely) to make sure you are wary and suspicious of what you start with (and also make sure no one can claim they supplied you with something dangerous without letting you know, so don't blame them if Bad Things happen.)
It's like selling you a car without seatbelts.
But what you learn, and the solutions you develop, are generally fully compatible with a "real" server.
XAMPP installation is easy as compared to LAMP. If you are on development server it makes no difference, but if you are on production server than it is good to do from basic instead of relying on 3rd party and you will get exact services you want on your production server, no extra services which can lower down your production server performance.
And try to keep same setup on development and production server, it will make sure that if application is running on development server will also run on production without doing any extra settings.
For production you've make your own configuration, it depends on visitors count, RAM installed on your server, scripts you're using. F.E. You need only 5 PHP extensions for Wordpress, but if you're using Woocommerce you need more PHP memory, for multiple sites you've use VirtualHosts, and if you have not domains registered also user UserDir modules.
All I've said is only examples, you must know your script requirements, install everything is not good idea.