Publish Node.JS server on the internet

Question

Publish Node.JS server on the internet

I have a Node.JS server that works fine on localhost. Now I want it accessible from the internet, hosted by my machine. My public IP address (the one that Google tells me I have) does not seem to be "accessible":

https.createServer({
    key: privateKey,
    cert: certificate
}, server).listen(80, '86.151.23.17');

fails with the following Node.JS error:

Error: listen EADDRNOTAVAIL
    at errnoException (net.js:770:11)
    at Server._listen2 (net.js:893:19)
    at listen (net.js:937:10)
    at Server.listen (net.js:994:9)
    at dns.js:71:18
    at process.startup.processNextTick.process._tickCallback (node.js:244:9)

How can I publish my Node.JS server to my public IP address?

[Note: I do not have another webserver running. Also, I have tried various different ports as suggested here.]

node.js
publish

Answer 1

You are most likely behind a router so your public IP is not available anywhere but on the router itself. What you need to do is listening on your private IP (usually somehing in the 192.168.* range) and setup a port forward on your router.

In case you are on Linux you'll also want to use a port >1024 instead of 80 so you don't have to run node as root. When setting up the port forwarding you can simply forward port 80 to whatever port your node server is running on.