How do I safely run a Node.js server on port 80 with Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

Question

The following error is common for people trying to run a Node.js server on port 80.

Error: listen EACCES 0.0.0.0:80

I used to solve this on my Amazon EC2 server simply by using

sudo node app.js

Now I've learned not to use that method for security concerns. A good solution as explained in this answer is to use:

sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin
sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep `readlink -f \`which node\``

However I'm not sure how to implement either solution on an AWS Elastic Beanstalk instance, where I don't seem to have SSH access the way I did for the AWS EC2 server, and the only way I seem to have for running anything is in my package.json file like this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node init"
  }
}

So I have no idea how I would run other types of commands. How is this done?

Answer 1

Beanstalk has a proxy build into it listening on port 80. Your Node.js app should only listen on process.env.PORT. Once it's done that, you'll be good to go.

Answer 2

Elastic beanstalk will route requests to your instances (at port 80 by default) from its load balancer. So in case you want to expose a particular port, you can add an entry to the load balancer listeners with the load balancer port as your desired port and instance port as 80.
Hope this helps. Can elaborate further if needed.