Question

My aim is to run Node.js on port 80. This is because I am finding node.js is being blocked from certain networks which do not allow traffic from any other port.

It appears that the best way to do this is by proxying Apache through Node.js. I have tried using node-http-proxy to do this but I have not had any luck.

The code I am using is here:

var util = require('util'),
    http = require('http'),
    httpProxy = require('http-proxy');

httpProxy.createServer(9000, 'localhost').listen(80);

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
  res.write('request successfully proxied to: ' + req.url + '\n' + JSON.stringify(req.headers, true, 2));
  res.end();
}).listen(9000);

But I keep getting the error “Address in use” for port 80. I must be doing something wrong.

How do I proxy Apache through node.js using node-http-proxy? Will this enable me to run node.js on port 80? And is node-http-proxy the best way to achieve this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

What you need to do is have 2 ip’s for the server you are running. Apache has 1 ip bound to port 80 and then node.js has the other ip bound to port 80.

Using node and its listen directive has 2 values eg. .listen(80, NODEJS_IP or DNS NAME);

Some other advice.

I would not use apache with nodejs as it’s not evented. So this really isn’t recommended. I would actually look into using NGINX as its a much better pairing with Node.