Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s reverse_proxy directive then this is the article for you!

You must seperate the socket.io sockets and the static resources.

• The socket connections can be routed through the default $host/socket.io if you want to ease modifications to the source code.
• The connections to your main npm Node.js application can be routed through the relevant directory.

Here is the relevant part of my projects.tait.tech.conf file:

location /socket.io {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/socket.io/;
  proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
  proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
  proxy_http_version 1.1;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location /ttrpg {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}

Explaination:

For this application, I needed the /ttrpg directory to connect to my main Node.js instance. This was going to be the root of a ttrpg project. It was to have static files served form my Node.js application.

I also needed /socket.io to conenct to my running npm instance. When I tried to route all the traffic through the /trrpg location directive I had no luck whatsoever; $host/ttrpg/socket.io/* calls always failed with a 404.

Having two seperate blocks forwarding in different ways seems to fix this. I am not knowledgable enough to understand how.

For now, the project is alive!!!

Happy hacking!

P.S. I forgot to mention I also symbolically linked the socket.io.js file (that node is supposed to serve automatically) to the static client dir. For some reson the node instance would not serve this file without that.

$ pwd
/home/user/ttrpg.co/client
$ ln -s ../server/node_modules/socket.io-client/dist/socket.io.js .

Happy hacking 2.0!