Running multiple Node (Express) apps on same port

Question

I have multiple Node applications (build on Express framework).

Now I have placed them like this -

• /var/www/app1
• /var/www/app2
• /var/www/app3

Now I want to run these 3 apps on the same port (say 8080). Is that possible ?

One thing to note is that, Each app has common routes like these -

• app.get('/', func...);
• app.get('/about', func...);
• app.post('/foo', func...);
• app.post('/bar', func...);

Basically I want to do it like you can do with Apache/PHP setup.

So with a LAMP stack when you have -

• /var/www/app1
• /var/www/app2
• /var/www/app3

You can easily access them as different apps from -

• localhost/app1
• localhost/app2
• localhost/app3

Answer 1

You can use app.use():

app
  .use('/app1', require('./app1/index').app)
  .use('/app2', require('./app2/index').app)
  .listen(8080);

Answer 2

You could run them as seperate apps listening to different ports and then have a proxy (like https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy/ ) serving everything on 8080 depending on the requested URL.

like:

var options = {
  router: {
    'foo.com/baz': '127.0.0.1:8001',
    'foo.com/buz': '127.0.0.1:8002',
    'bar.com/buz': '127.0.0.1:8003'
  }
};

Works like charm for me ( http://nerdpress.org/2012/04/20/hosting-multiple-express-node-js-apps-on-port-80/). I wasn't so keen on having them mounted as sub-apps, as suggested in the comments because i wanted them to run independently...

Answer 3

You can create one main app(say app) parallel to you apps, and have it initializing the secondary apps (in your case app1, app2, app3) using

app.use('<the_context_you_need>', require('./app1/yourApp.js')

All your apps (app1, app2, app3) need to create app and export it by using

var app = module.exports = express();

You need not create instance of server or call app.listen in all the subapps; all the sub-apps can be served via main app listen port.