Proxing Websocket Traffic from Nginx to Socket.io (without SSL) - node.js

Question

As of yesterday nginx started to support websocket connections, therefore i was trying to get my nginx-nodejs-socket.io application to work without harproxy ect (not much luck though).
What i want exactly to achieve is nginx to send only websocket connection requests to a backed server,or websocket server ,socket.io to be more exact, while in the same time nginx will be serving php files, and all static content including html files.I dont want express to serve static content at all (if this is possible).
Here is my nginx.conf
#user nobody;
worker_processes 1;
#error_log logs/error.log;
#error_log logs/error.log notice;
#error_log logs/error.log info;
#pid logs/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
#log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
# '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
# '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
#access_log logs/access.log main;
sendfile on;
#tcp_nopush on;
#keepalive_timeout 0;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
upstream backend {
server 127.0.0.1:8080;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
charset UTF-8;
#access_log logs/host.access.log main;
location / {
root /website/html_public;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
}
#error_page 404 /404.html;
# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /website/html_public;
}
# proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80
#
#location ~ \.php$ {
# proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1;
#}
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
location ~ \.php$ {
root /website/html_public;
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
# concurs with nginx's one
#
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
location /connection {
proxy_pass http://backend;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}
}
# another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration
#
#server {
# listen 8000;
# listen somename:8080;
# server_name somename alias another.alias;
# location / {
# root /website/html_public;
# index index.php index.html index.htm;
# }
#}
}
Here is my server.js file in node
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var port = 8080;
/* HTTP Server*/
server = require('http').createServer(app);
server.listen(port);
app.use(express.logger(':remote-addr - :method :url HTTP/:http-version :status :res[content-length] - :response-time ms'));
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/html_public'));
app.use(express.favicon());
app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.set('view options', { layout: false });
app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
app.get('/', function(req, res){
res.render('index.html');
});
/*
* Web Sockets
*/
io = require('socket.io').listen(server),
io.configure('production', function(){
io.enable('browser client etag');
io.set('log level', 1);
io.set('transports', [ 'websocket', 'htmlfile', 'xhr-polling', 'jsonp-polling' ]);
});
console.log('Chat Server started with Node '+ process.version +', platform '+ process.platform + 'to port %d',port);
From my client, i try to connect like this :
socket = new io.connect('http://localhost/connection');
Now, the problem is that when i try to connect normally, typing localhost, i see on chrome console:
**GET http://localhost/socket.io/socket.io.js 404 (Not Found)** , and also when type in the browser http://localhost/connection i receive "Cannot GET /connection" which is telling me that nginx doesn't proxy websockets normally with my current configuration.
Thanks in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

Let me guess, you want:
location /connection {
proxy_pass http://backend/;
...
}
but you have:
location /connection {
proxy_pass http://backend;
...
}
http://nginx.org/r/proxy_pass

Answer 2

Just to make sure, do you have Nginx version 1.3.13 ? ( ex. Nginx's PPA don't have that version yet.)