Nginx (serving html) and Node.js setup

Question

I was thinking of building a web app which would be single page, using only javascript to update the page (no reloads). So I'm confused about what kind of setup to use.

I'm kinda new to both technologies, so I was wondering if you can set up nginx to serve html (+ js, css and other static resources) like a normal web server and then from those pages connect to a node.js websocket server (same host/ip) using something like socket.io?

Is this setup good or bad? What would be a better approach? What advantage would I get if I serve html pages in node.js and get static resources (css, js, images, ...) from nginx?

Answer 1

I dont think serving few images and static htmls from nodejs itself will ever be a bottleneck , ideally a front end proxy like nginx is required if you need to load balance between multiple servers and also for exposing you internal http services as https traffic. If you dont have that requirement it would be a overkill imho.

Answer 2

From various comments in the currently accepted answer, I wanted to note the following.

NodeJS itself does a pretty decent job of delivering static content, as good as nginx in many cases.

Trying to proxy a WebSocket connection is problematic at best currently, as most proxy code simply doesn't support it. Currently, it is best to use Node directly.

If/When you have a need to deliver static content separately, best to use another domain and a CDN at that point.