Node JS Application running on Apache CentOS6 - htaccess

Question

We have searched and searched, but cannot for the life of us figure out how to edit our .htaccess file to allow our node.js application to run.

• Our root domain runs a wordpress website. We have built a custom API in Node to be deployed on www.website.com/api .
• We have node successfully installed on our centOS6. We are also able to run the node server successfully in the terminal by navigating to the /api folder and running nohup node my_app.js & . The logs confirm the server is running on port 51900.

Here's the problem. We know the node API is running, we just cant figure out how to see it. We're pretty sure we have to change our .htaccess file to redirect the /api/ directory. Here is a copy/paste of our .htaccess file and what we have so far. Our redirects don't seem to work though.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^/api$ http://127.0.0.1:51900/ [P,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/api/(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:51900/$1 [P,L]
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to exclude your API URL from wordpress. Also in .htaccess you do not prepend a / in the rewriterule eg ^/api . There is no prepending slash in directory (htaccess) context. It should be ^api . So that's also why your rule is not matching. Try this and see if it helps.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^api/(.*)?$ http://127.0.0.1:51900/$1 [P,L]

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>