第二个节点服务器（或端口）不会在生产中启动（Elastic Beanstalk）

Question

I have a Node/Angular app I'm trying to deploy. It uses two node servers: One to essentially serve the app; another to get data from an API, when a specific port is requested by the app, and store that data locally.

I've got it working perfectly on my own local machine. However, when I deploy to production environments -- either Heroku or AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- I find that the second script either won't run or won't start properly. The end result is, it doesn't get the data I need.

Here are the two scripts; they're both set to run in package.json under "start": "node main.js & node node-server.js"

main.js (again, this one seems to be serving the app just fine):

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/app'));
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000);

node-server.js (the one that doesn't seem to work; no data is gathered or populated in the app):

var http = require('http');
var port2 = 1234
var fs = require('fs');

//We need a function which handles requests and send response
function handleRequest(req, res) {
    request.get({
        url: 'http://sample-url.json',
        qs: {
            url: 'http://sampletool/pb/newsletter/?content=true'
        }
    }, function (err, result) {
        res.end(result.body);

        fs.writeFile('app/data.json', result.body, function (err) {
            if (err) return console.log(err);
            console.log('API data > data.json');
        });

    });
}

//Create a server
var server = http.createServer(handleRequest);

//Lets start our server
server.listen(port2, function () {
    //Callback triggered when server is successfully listening. Hurray!
    console.log("Server listening on: http://0.0.0.0:%d", port2);
});

Then, the main Angular app calls this port ( http://0.0.0.0:1234 ) when the page is loaded, to request new data.

Elastic Beanstalk is using nginx, something I'm not super familiar with and that I don't have running on my local.

Is there something big I'm missing in configuring multiple node.js servers to be running on different ports in a production environment? Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

For security reasons, cloud service providers typically allow the usage of only one port (which is dynamically and randomly assigned to the PORT environment variable) for an application to use from a node server. Read this section from Heroku documentation to understand more about this.

This is why the main app ( main.js ) that uses process.env.PORT is working and the other app ( node-server.js ) that uses hard-coded 1234 is not.

This question has some pointers about the feasibility of multiple ports on Heroku (though, there is no good news there, I am afraid).

As how to go about fixing this, one thing that could be tried is to split this into two separate apps that are deployed separately with separate package.json etc.