Redirect a domain to a ip and port

Question

I have a node.js server listening on port 4000

how can I redirect my domain name: www.mydomain.com to a ip and port? The domain provider only allows an ip address without a portnumber in the redirection field. If I do a URL redirect, then the name of my side is not shown.

Please let me know how can I redirect it to my domain?

121.12.12.123:4000    redirect to   www.mydomain.com

Answer 1

HTTP requests usually come in on port 80. When you type in a domain and do not specify a port, it automatically connects to port 80. You have a few options. You can run your Node.js server as root and have it listen on port 80, but it's not recommended.

You can also setup a Nginx on port 80 and use it to reverse proxy requests to your Node.js process which is listening on port 4000, but this introduces another component in your stack to manage and introduces a little bit of overhead for each request.

The way I prefer to handle this is to setup a redirect in iptables (assuming you're using Linux).

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 4000

That will redirect all traffic from port 80 to port 4000, where you're listening Node.js process is.

That allows you to run your Node.js process as an unprivileged user, but still answer requests on port 80.

Once you've done that than you can simply point your domain to the IP address of the server and normal web requests should work. Just be sure you have port 80 open on any firewalls first.

Answer 2

try this code

var httpProxy = require('http-proxy');
httpProxy.createProxyServer({target:'http://localhost:4000'}).listen(80);