Question

Websocket connection failed error

Posted on June 1, 2023
DigitalOcean Droplets DigitalOcean App Platform
Asked by MassiveCyanCoral

I had previously tried setting up Nginx with a Droplet but wasn’t successful. I deleted the Droplet and then deployed my app from the Apps service. The app is live but I’m getting the error:

“WebSocketClient.js:13 WebSocket connection to ‘wss://website.io:8080/ws’”.

Is it possible that some bad configuration from the Droplet and Nginx was leftover and is causing this conflict?

Thanks

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• June 1, 2023

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

I think that when instantiating the web socket, you should not add the port as it is not publicly exposed on the App Platform.

Instead you should do something like this:

const protocol = window.location.protocol.includes('https') ? 'wss': 'ws'
const ws = new WebSocket(`${protocol}://${location.host}/ws`);

Here is a great step by step tutorial that covers the whole process specifically for the App Platform:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/tutorials/app-deploy-websockets/

UPDATE:

It looks like that this is a standard thing for some React apps:

What you have to do is to define an environment variable in your app platform and define the WDS_SOCKET_PORT variable and set it to 443 rather than the default value.

You can check that this would already work by visiting your website and in the web console run: