Remove port from Node js website url

Question

I am new to node js. I am using express with node js. My node application is running properly, but my app can't run without starting the server from the terminal.

What is the right way to remove port from node url and run app on simple url without port?

Answer 1

Client side

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By default, the port is 80 when a browser make an HTTP request.

If you type localhost, the real request is localhost:80 because no port is specified. It will be the same with any domain name. If you type example.com, the real request is example.com:80.

It is the client (here the browser) which choose on which port it will make his request to the server.

You can force your browser to emit a request on any port by adding :port_number after the domain name, as localhost:3000 or example.com:3000. Here we change the port from 80 to 3000.

Server side

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The web server chooses on which port it listens for requests. It can be 80, 3000 or any other port.

If a client makes an HTTP request, your web server needs to listen to the right port. If the client emits example.com:4000, your web server must listen on port 4000 to get and process the request.

To make a web server, you can use Node.js, Apache (used in LAMP), Nginx etc. You can have multiple web servers running on your system and each of them can use multiple ports, but you can't make them listen on the same port. One of your web server may not start or could take the lead on others or crash...

Solutions are to use only one web server or to use multiple web server on different ports. In your situation, you are using LAMP so Apache web server. Its probably running on port 80 in his configuration. In this case you can't run a Node web server on port 80 because it's already in use. You should choose another port like 3000 for example. Both Node and Apache will then run on your system but on different ports respectively 3000 and 80.

In this last situation, you can access directly to Apache, but not to Node without precise the port 3000. To be able to access Node web server by port 80 without stopping Apache, you need to go through Apache and to make it redirect requests to your Node server in some cases. To do that, you need to configurate a proxy in your Apache. Note that it would be the same if you was using Nginx or other web servers.

Example

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Let's take a simple express server on port 3000 :

// server.js  
var express = require('express'),
        app = express(),
        http = require('http').createServer(app),
        port = 3000;

app.get('*', function (req, res, next) { res.sendFile(__dirname + '/views/index.html'); });

http.listen(port, function () { console.log('App running & listening on port ' + port); });

• If you type in the terminal node server.js, you can access from browser by localhost:3000, but you can't access by localhost because no web server is running on port 80.

• If you change port variable to 80, you can access from browser by localhost or localhost:80, but not by localhost:3000 anymore.

• If you edit /etc/hosts (sudo nano /etc/hosts) with a new line 127.0.0.1 example.com, you can access from browser by example.com if port is 80, else example.com:port_number like example.com:3000. This third solution maps domain name to ip address in your local client only.

If the chosen port, 80 for example, is already in use by another process (as LAMP), your node server may not works. In this case you should close this other process first or choose another port for your node process. In the third example, if you close the LAMP first, you can access from browser by example.com, if you choose another port for Node, you can access from browser by example.com:port_number like example.com:3000 for Node and still access your LAMP server on port 80.

Don't forget that 80 is the default port used by the browser if no port is specified. If you use another port, you should precise it from the browser by adding :port_number after your domain.

• Now if you own a real domain name you will need to make a real DNS mapping not juts edit /etc/hosts. Configure your DNS on your registar account (where you bought your domain name) to make it point to your server's IP. Like that, when a client make an HTTP request to the domain name, it will be redirected to your server.

• To have both Apache and Node.js running and available on port 80, you should make a proxy as explain above. Indeed, for you the problem is probably that you have a web server already running on port 80 (Apache with LAMP) and you want also your Node.js app to run on port 80 to don't force clients to precise the port at the end of the url. To fix that, you need to make a proxy in Apache conf to redirect requests which come from the specific domain name to your localhost node server process on the right port.

Something like that in your apache conf :

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName example.com
  ServerAlias www.example.com

  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyVia Full

  ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
</VirtualHost>

Here when a request arrive on your server on port 80, Apache will check if it comes from example.com and if it is, it will redirect to 127.0.0.1:3000 where your node server will take the lead. The two different process (Apache & Node) should run in the same time on your server on different port.

Answer 2

When you see a URL, without a port, it means one of two ports are being served:

• https:// - port 443
• http:// - port 80

Even assuming the port is not in use, you can't service directly to port 80 without superuser privileges because port 80 and port 443 are privileged ports.

If you want to test the server running on port 80 directly:

sudo node index.js

Where index.js is the name of your Express application.

Keeping it running

Because you tagged apache, I'm assuming you want to know how to set up a node server using Apache. If you don't need a production quality server and just want to keep it running all the time, you can do that too.

Dev/Just keep it running

You can daemonize your server. A quick look for a "node" solution exposes forever as a way to do that. Simply install and run like this:

yarn global add forever
# or
# npm i -g forever
# remember, sudo for port 80
sudo forever start index.js

Production/Apache

Use a non-privileged port for Node, and set up a proxy in Apache. Something like:

ProxyPass / http://localhost:8000

If you set the port to 8000. Put that in a <VirtualHost>. Examples here. Likely you would still want to daemonize your nodejs Application using forever or some similar daemon tool (systemd is great for Linux services)