Error: listen EACCES 0.0.0.0:80 OSx Node.js

Question

I'm following a tutorial in a angularJS book and have to setup a server. This is the server.js file:

 var express = require('express');
  var app = express();
   app.use('/', express.static('./'));
    app.listen(80);

I get this error:

$ node server.js
events.js:154
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
      ^

Error: listen EACCES 0.0.0.0:80

I know already, that the Error EACCES means that i don't have access rights to the port 80, but i don't know how to fix this. Any help much appreciated!

Answer 1

If you need to run the server on port 80 you should use a reverse proxy like nginx that will run using a system account on a privileged port and proxy the requests to your Node.js server running on an unprivileged port (> 1024).

When running in development environment you're pretty much free to run as root (ie. sudo node server.js), but that is rather dangerous in production environment.

Here's a sample nginx config that will see if the request is for a file that exists in the filesystem, and if not, proxy the request to your Node.js server running on port 9000

upstream yournodeapp {
  server localhost:9000 fail_timeout=0;
  keepalive 60;
}

server {
  server_name localhost;
  listen 80 default_server;

  # Serve static assets from this folder
  root /home/user/project/public;

  location / {
    try_files $uri @yournodeapp;
  }

  location @yournodeapp {
    proxy_pass http://yournodeapp;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
  }
}

Answer 2

to give root access to node and start server on port 80 you can do

sudo node app.js

this will start the server giving permission on port 80

Answer 3

Foremost, do not run as root. That's asking for 'it'. "It" is really bad. Go see the movie. Then, don't run your node web project as root.

// DO NOT DO THIS!
$ sudo node app.js

// DO NOT DO THIS EITHER!
$ sudo su -
# node app.js

Instead, use PM2 and authbind to do this:

// %user% is whatever user is running your code
sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chown %user% /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chmod 755 /etc/authbind/byport/80

Next, add this alias to your ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile:

alias pm2='authbind --deep pm2'

Then, try it with pm2:

pm2 start app.js

Answer 4

On Windows I fixed this by setting Express to listen on port 8080 for HTTP and 8443 for HTTPS. It really doesn't like using those lower number ports. Also I have IIS installed and running so it might be some sort of port conflict there too.