Question

My work runs a couple different internal web apps on an ubuntu server (10.10) running apache. I’m currently developing another web app, and am seriously considering developing on top of a custom-built node.js web server. My reasoning for wanting to do this is:

1. Speed/Scalability
2. Security – Pages will be served with a switch…case, instead of just serving the (potentially malicious) user whatever they ask for.
3. Ease of setup – my intentions are for this to be an open-source project, and node.js is much easier for users to set up, rather than dealing with apache/IIS/etc.

My question is, on a server where I’ve got apache listening to port 80, how can I pass off a certain subdomains to node.js. I’ve seen a couple articles about using apache virtual hosts to pass it off, but that seems to defeat the purpose of using node.js. If I have to go through apache, then all three of my reasons for avoiding apache/IIS have voided themselves.

I know I could use a different port (:8080?), but from an end-user standpoint, it’s pretty confusing having to put in custom ports. Any alternative ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

How about doing things the other way round : bind node to port 80, handle the traffic targeted at the subdomain and use it as a reverse proxy to apache for everything else ?