confusion in bootstrapping my application in backbonejs

I have a working application in codeigniter phil sturgeon REST API with backbone.js, underscore.js and require.js

Ineed to use mongodb and node.js in the backend. I have build a working REST API for the same. Now i am clueless as to how to migrate my whole project to work with this API. I use XAMPP on windows to serve apache. So since now i don't need to use xamp, how do i determine the structure of file system?

what files will go there? how do i bootstrap my application?

Node.js comes with an application server.

You need to run your application server at a certain port (e.g. localhost:3000).

There are multiple ways to deal this:

Application Server is also the Web server.

That means your application server at port 80. That's not really an optimal solution as application servers are not ideal for static assets. I think there are some security issues too but need to read on that.

Setup a web server and forward requests to application server

Here you will setup a web server. apache is a web server but for nginx is optimal for node.js applications. So you run your web server on port 80 and forward all requests to your application server port (e.g. 3000) . You setup nginx in a way so that for static assets (images, javascripts, css etc.) it doesn't bother application server but just serve the files directly from the file system.

Setup a proxy server in node.js

Take a look at Bounce Not sure how it performs in a production setup but the reviews are good. But it suffers from slowness in serving static asset.