Question

I have a website hosted on lighttpd, accessible at the “www” subdomain. I also have a chat server listening on port 8124 made with node.js and socket.io.

I want all client traffic to happen on port 80, by redirecting all requests to the “chat” subdomain to port 8124. So I enabled mod_proxy and in lighttpd.conf I added:

$HTTP["host"] == "chat.myserver.com" {
    proxy.server = (
            "" => ((
                    "host" => "78.128.79.192",
                    "port" => "8124"
            ))
    )
}

On the client, when I connect to the websocket,

var socket = io.connect('http://chat.myserver.com');

I get the right messages from node.js:

debug - client authorized
info  - handshake authorized 6067470561567883577
debug - setting request GET /socket.io/1/websocket/6067470561567883577
debug - set heartbeat interval for client 6067470561567883577
debug - client authorized for 
debug - websocket writing 1::

But the browser gives an error:

Firefox can't connect to server ws://chat.myserver.com/socket.io/1/websocket/6067470561567883577

Of course, everything works correctly if I connect directly to the port 8124:

var socket = io.connect('http://www.myserver.com:8124');

But, as I said, I would like all client traffic to be on port 80. Is it possibile?

Answer 1

mod_proxy is known to be not compatible with websockets.

HAProxy is compatible (I haven’t tested it myself but here’s an article on its configuration for websockets).