Question

How do I run a web service with websockets on app platform?

I’m trying to run a Node.js app that exposes a websocket server to the internet. I am unable to connect to my websocket server on the HTTP port that the app platform app has me specify.


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Steven Normore
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
October 12, 2020
Accepted Answer

@samueldevstiles 👋

Services that you run on the App Platform are exposed via app domains on port 443/HTTPS. So you should also use the wss:// scheme when connecting. This is not necessarily the same port as you would specify that your service is listening on internally.

I have a sample nodejs repo that uses websockets and can be forked + deployed to the App Platform without any changes if that helps as a reference: https://github.com/snormore/sample-websocket

Dikshith Shetty
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
October 10, 2020

Hey,

Services within the same application share a private network with one another. You should be able to communicate between the components using internal HTTP. Components can be referenced by their component name, for example: if you have two services with an app, api, and web. The web service could make requests to http://api for internal communication.

Regards,

Dikshith

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel