How to host servicestack on node.js? - node.js

Question

We have a Icneium Hybrid Mobile app accessing servicestack REST services. Is it OK to host the servicestack on Node.js instead of IIS? Any examples are highly appreciated.

Answer 1

You won't be able to host ServiceStack in node.js directly, but there are many proxy modules for node that can transparently proxy requests to a ServiceStack Self Hosted application, thus removing the need for IIS.
You now have two options:
If your intent is just to ditch IIS and you don't specifically need node.js then a self hosted application is great, because there are no other dependency layers. Requests can go straight to ServiceStack.
But if you are looking to have some integration with node.js, then as I said a transparent proxy can forward the requests to the ServiceStack service, but you will still need the Self Hosted ServiceStack service running behind the node proxy.
Set up a Self Hosted ServiceStack Service
To get this to work. You would need to configure ServiceStack to use Self Hosting. The way this is done is to create a AppHostHttpListenerBase AppHost in a console application, as shown in the link (above).
Once you have a Self Hosted application, you will have configured the hostname and port that ServiceStack will listen on. If you navigate to that URL you should see your ServiceStack service.
If you chose not to use node (option 1), then the ServiceStack application is ready to be accessed directly. If you do wish to use with node because you have some other part of your application already use node (option 2) then follow the next steps to setup a proxy.
Node.JS Proxy
There are many proxy modules for node available. I have chosen to go with the popular node-http-proxy, by nodejitsu.
Setup looks simple. Requests on port 80 standard http port will be forwarded to ServiceStack application on localhost:9000. Assuming that's were its running.
var http = require('http'),
httpProxy = require('http-proxy');
httpProxy.createProxyServer({target:'http://localhost:9000'}).listen(80);
If you need more control. Check out all the options in the documentation.