What is modern way to hosting `node.js` applications on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 and newer?

Question

I want to know how to deploy my node.js application (it uses Koa) on Windows 10, Windows server 2012 and newer.

In Internet I see old tips for using iisnode, but at the same time I see that people worry that developers no answer for many important questions (related with iisnode) and long time doesn't make changes to the iisnode code sources. :(

What is modern way to hosting node.js applications on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 and newer?

I would be grateful for link to step-by-step article.

Answer 1

There are a few ways you can run NodeJS on Windows for production workloads.

It's important to first understand that Windows has built-in (kernel mode!) support for HTTP servers called HTTP.sys which IIS and other web-servers use to serve HTTP traffic rather than simply opening a listening socket on port 80 (this is how Microsoft's IIS beat the pants off Apache in the web-server benchmarks back in the late 1990s).

Your options are:

• Expose NodeJS directly to port 80/443
  • This is the simplest approach though with many drawbacks. But provided you don't need to run different multiple applications and non-NodeJS code on the server then this is a valid option. Just remember to disable HTTP.sys first.
• Run NodeJS behind HTTP.sys
  • The author of the iisnode library also wrote another lib called httpsys for NodeJS (as running behind IIS uses many of the same techniques as running behind HTTP.sys): https://github.com/tjanczuk/httpsys - unfortunately it's out of date, but there really isn't much code to it so you can probably hack it yourself to work with the latest versions of Node. This is one of the points of open-source! ("Don't complain, fix it!")

• Run NodeJS behind IIS with Microsoft's fork of iisnode:

  • While the original iisnode is abandoned, Microsoft actually took over ownership and forked it to https://github.com/Azure/iisnode which does seem to be actively maintained - and Microsoft has a vested interest in maintaining it because Microsoft wants to make money from the world running its apps on Azure regardless of whatever language, platform or OS they're using.

• Run NodeJS behind an nginx port for Windows

  • Not recommend on Windows because its own author says it has poor performance: http://nginx.org/en/docs/windows.html

• One last option (and probably the best for your situation) is to run NodeJS on Windows as-is and use IIS' Application Request Routing (ARR) feature:

  • ARR enables IIS to act as a (complicated) reverse-proxy (as opposed to life on Linux where nginx is a lightweight reverse-proxy). See here: https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/application-request-routing with step-by-step instructions here: https://dev.to/petereysermans/hosting-a-node-js-application-on-windows-with-iis-as-reverse-proxy-397b