Question

I am using out of the box expressjs app, and I’m using node 0.8.2. Works great locally, but when I push to the Cloud Foundry I get the following error, and I have no idea where to start with debugging. I’m assuming that this is caused by a configuration issue or a dependency issue, but I don’t know what to do.

Express
500 TypeError: Object # has no method ‘randomBytes’
at Object.uid (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/utils.js:122:17)
at MemoryStore.generate (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:203:27)
at generate (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:281:13)
at Object.session [as handle] (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:290:7)
at next (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/proto.js:190:15)
at Object.cookieParser [as handle] (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/cookieParser.js:60:5)
at next (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/proto.js:190:15)
at Object.methodOverride [as handle] (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/methodOverride.js:37:5)
at next (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/proto.js:190:15)
at multipart (/var/vcap/data/dea/apps/dwgapp1-0-690016dc6c7142f385b44b144d3d380e/app/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/multipart.js:62:61)

    var express = require('express')
       , routes = require('./routes')
       , user = require('./routes/user')
       , http = require('http')
       , path = require('path');

    var app = express();

    app.configure(function(){
       app.set('port', process.env.VCAP_APP_PORT || 3000);
       app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
       app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
       app.use(express.favicon());
       app.use(express.logger('dev'));
       app.use(express.bodyParser());
       app.use(express.methodOverride());
       app.use(express.cookieParser('your secret here'));
       app.use(express.session());
       app.use(app.router);
       app.use(require('stylus').middleware(__dirname + '/public'));
       app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public')));
    });

    app.configure('development', function(){
       app.use(express.errorHandler());
    });

    app.get('/', routes.index);
    app.get('/users', user.list);

    http.createServer(app).listen(app.get('port'), function(){
       console.log("Express server listening on port " + app.get('port'));
    });

Answer 1

It seems that this issue was caused by connect, a dependency of express. I had originally created my app using express running on node 0.8.8, and CF was using 0.8.2. Even though I it didn’t seem to make a difference locally, when I deployed to Cloud Foundry I was getting this error.

I created an entirely new app, running Node 0.8.2 from the beginning. This seemed to fix the issue.