I hope this doesn't come across as a terribly silly question, but I'm learning how to implement a socket.io server for my website to produce real-time applications, but my problem is that I can't figure out how to implement said applications in an Apache served environment. Currently, when I run node server.js to start my socket.io server, I have to access it by visiting http://localhost:XXXX where XXXX is whatever port I attach it to, naturally. I don't want my website to be forced to be viewed on an alternate port like this, but I obviously can't attach the server to port 80 since Apache is listening on that.
Obviously a natural solution would be to stop the Apache service and then node the server on port 80 that way to avoid a collision, but I don't want to sacrifice all of the functionality that Apache offers. Basically, I want to continue to serve my website via Apache on port 80, and integrate certain aspects of real-time applications via socket.io on port 3000, let's say.
Is there a way to do this that avoid the things I don't want? Those things being 1) having users access my site with :3000 in the URL, 2) disabling Apache, 3) using iframes.
Thanks in advance.
Generally, you should be able to hide Node.js with mod_proxy. A bit of searching turned up this: https://github.com/sindresorhus/guides/blob/master/run-node-server-alongside-apache.md (old link died, this is a new one)
However, Socket.io can be a bit finicky (https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/25), so you may have problems with it specifically.
As that ticket is a bit old, it's worth a shot. Just don't be surprised if you have problems. You're next bet after that is bind Node.js toport 80 and have it act as a reverse proxy for Apache with https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy (still under a fair bit of development).
The optimal solution would be run it on it's own server and just have you're socket traffic go to socket.example.com or something like that.
Socket.io has multiple transport mechanisms. Some of them don't work if you run Apache as reverse proxy, but some do. Transports that don't work are websocket and flash, but xhr-polling and jsonp-polling should work.
Here's an example on setting the transports configuration option for socket.io:
var io = require("socket.io").listen(server);
io.set("transports", ["xhr-polling", "jsonp-polling"]);
On my Apache I'm using the normal name based virtual hosts and reverse proxy setup and with these transports the socket.io seems to be working.
