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<!DOCTYPE html><htmllang="en"><head><metacharset="UTF-8"><title>How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io | tait.tech</title><linkrel="stylesheet"href="/assets/css/style.css"><metaname="viewport"content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><metaname="author"content="Tait Hoyem"><metaname="keywords"content=""><metaname="description"content=""></head><body><divid="wrapper"><header><nav><inputtype="checkbox"id="menu"><labelfor="menu">☰</label><divclass="menu-content"><ahref="/"class="nav-link">Home</a><ahref="/blog/"class="nav-link">Blog</a><ahref="https://github.com/TTWNO/"class="nav-link"target="_blank"rel="noopener noreferrer">Github</a></div></nav></header><main><article><header><h1class="post-title">How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io</h1><timedatetime="20-05-01"class="post-date">Friday, May 01 2020</time></header><hr><p>Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">reverse_proxy</code> directive then this is the article for you!</p><p>You <em>must</em> seperate the socket.io sockets and the static resources.</p><ul><li>The socket connections can be routed through the default <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$host/socket.io</code> if you want to ease modifications to the source code.</li><li>The connections to your main npm Node.js application can be routed through the relevant directory.</li></ul><p>Here is the relevant part of my <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">projects.tait.tech.conf</code> file:</p><preclass="terminal">
</pre><h3id="explaination">Explaination:</h3><p>For this application, I needed the <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/ttrpg</code> directory to connect to my main Node.js instance. This was going to be the root of a ttrpg project. It was to have static files served form my Node.js application.</p><p>I also needed <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/socket.io</code> to conenct to my running <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">npm</code> instance. When I tried to route all the traffic through the <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/trrpg</code> location directive I had no luck whatsoever; <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$host/ttrpg/socket.io/*</code> calls <em>always</em> failed with a 404.</p><p>Having two seperate blocks forwarding in different ways seems to fix this. I am not knowledgable enough to understand how.</p><p>For now, the project is alive!!!</p><p>Happy hacking!</p><p><em>P.S. I forgot to mention I also symbolically linked the <codeclass="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">socket.io.js</code> file (that node is supposed to serve automatically) to the static client dir. For some reson the node instance would not serve this file without that.</em></p><preclass="terminal">
</pre><p><em>Happy hacking 2.0!</em></p></article></main><hr><footer> This page is mirrored on <ahref="https://beta.tait.tech/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html">beta.tait.tech</a>. </footer></div></body></html>
