Ubuntu: Http-server on port 80 starting up, but can't access from browser?

Question

So I have a web application being run on an http-server via npm. In my package.jsonfile, I have the line "start": "sudo http-server -a [my ip address] -p 8065 -c-1", and my app runs fine when I go to http://myipaddress:8065. However if I change the 8065 to just 80, in the json file (which is what I want), I still get the success message:

Starting up http-server, serving ./
Available on:
http://myipaddress:80

But when I go to the link, chrome givess me an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. Anybody know what's going on?

Answer 1

I would suggest there are three possible problems here.

1. Port 80 is already in use.
2. You are not running the application as root (you can't bind to ports <1024 if you are not root)
3. http-server isn't binding correctly

---

To check if port 80 is already in use try

netstat -lntu | grep :80

If port 80 is already in use you should see something like

tcp6       0      0 :::80                 :::*                    LISTEN

You will need to close whatever is running on port 80 (apache? nginx?)

---

To check if you can actually bind to port 80, try running http-server from the console rather than via npm i.e.

sudo http-server -a [my ip address] -p 80 -c-1

If the above works you should be able to run npm as root to start your http-server i.e.

sudo npm start

You may need to remove sudo from your package.json:

"start": "http-server -a [my ip address] -p 8065 -c-1"

---

We need to make sure that http-server is working correctly on your system. We will test it with w3m a console based web browser.

You may need to install w3m with sudo apt-get install w3m if you do not have it already.

1. create a new directory. mkdir /tmp/testing
2. CD into new dir cd /tmp/testing
3. Start http-server with `http-server . -a localhost -p 1234
4. Visit http://localhost:1234 with w3m w3m http://localhost:1234/
5. Start http-server with `http-server . -a localhost -p 80
6. Visit http://localhost in a w3m w3m http://localhost/ does it work?