Why won't my app establish websocket connection on Heroku?

Question

I am trying to deploy my nodejs app on heroku. I cannot get the websocket connection to establish. I have read everything I could find, tried every example and none of them seem to work for me.

I when I try to open my page "heroku open", nodejs is correctly giving me the html file. However, the websocket 'ws' connection never establishes.

My server.js has these configurations:

var pport = process.env.PORT || 5000;
server.listen(pport, function(err) {
    if(!err) { console.log("Listening on port " + pport); }
});

Side Note When I check "heroku logs", I find that the port my app is running on is a random 5 digit number. ( like 28896, 53365, etc.) It never actually runs on the second half || 5000.

But the thing is, in order for my game.html file to establish a websocket connection, it needs to know what port. I have tried the following client configurations, none have worked:

1)

var host = location.origin.replace(/^http/, 'ws');
this.connection = new WebSocket(host);

2)

var host = location.origin.replace(/^http/, 'ws');
host = host + ":5000";
this.connection = new WebSocket(host);

3)

this.connection = new WebSocket('ws://infinite-earth-7708.herokuapp.com/');

I have also done what their website said, and attempted to use the following after deploying my app:

heroku config:add NODE_ENV=production

Please advise

Answer 1

Well I figured it out. Here is what you should know:

• I did not change my server configurations from my original post.

My client configurations looked like this:

var host = location.origin.replace(/^http/, 'ws');
this.connection = new WebSocket(host);

But here is the kicker. On the terminal I used the following command:

heroku labs:enable websockets

And voila, it works! I hope this helps someone.