How do I deploy socket.io to Google App Engine?

Question

I created my first node.js app using socket.io. Specifically I implemented the chat example published by socket.io. It works perfectly, locally. And then I tried deploying i

Answer 1

In short this cannot be done on production and it appears to be work in process. The right architecture is to have a chat server on google compute engine as outlined here.

But as a proof of concept to use socket.io on google app engine is very similar to that shown in google appengine samples for websockets.

In case of socket.io do the following steps on server side. Code snippet below.

1. Create second express middleware and server.
2. Attach/use socket.io with new server.
3. Listen to port (65080).
4. Open firewall for port (65080) on google compute engine.
5. Link to working repository.

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socket.io changes on server side

    var app_chat = require('express')();
    var server1 = require('http').Server(app_chat);
    var io = require('socket.io')(server1);
    server1.listen(65080);

    io.on('connection', function (socket) {
      console.log('user connected');
      socket.on('chat_message', function (data) {
        console.log('client sent:',data);
        socket.emit('chat_message', 'Server is echoing your message: ' + data);
      });
    });

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open firewall by command

gcloud compute firewall-rules create default-allow-websockets \
    --allow tcp:65080 \
    --target-tags websocket \
    --description "Allow websocket traffic on port 65080"

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I hope Google comes up with a production-ready solution soon enough on as this will become a key armour in any PaaS-arsenal.