Do I have to have the other node apps on?

[junerockwell]

Let's say that I have 3 apps; #1 is the proxy and using this http-proxy-rules, #2 nodeapp1 was built using Restify and #3 nodeapp2 was built using Restify as well. I'm using PM2 to keep them alive.

My proxy server's main.js looks like this:

var proxyRules = new HttpProxyRules({
     rules: {
         '.*/test': 'http://localhost:8081', // Rule (1) 
         '.*/test2/': 'http://localhost:8082' // Rule (2) 
    },
    default: 'http://localhost:8080' // default target 
});
...
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
   var target = proxyRules.match(req);
   if (target) {
       return proxy.web(req, res, {
             target: target
  });
}

   res.writeHead(500, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
   res.end('The request url and path did not match any of the listed rules!');
}).listen(8080, cb);

As you can see, I didn't follow your example. In your example, you used port 6061 on the proxy server which is a different number from the test and test2 which both have the same port number 8080 because your specific example didn't work for me.

Question #1: I would like to know how you did this. If possible, I would like to know how to use the same hostname and the same port number for all 3 apps.

Question #2: How did you come up with the a url that has the same hostname and port number but different different paths which are cool and cool2?

Question #3: If I copy exactly your example, do I have to have nodeapp1 and nodeapp2 running or do I just have the proxy server run?

My nodeapp1's app.js ends in this:

app.listen(8081, function() {
    console.log('nodeapp1');
 });

Same for nodeapp2:

app.listen(8082, function() {
    console.log('nodeapp1');
 });

[donasaur]

Hey @junerockwell , to answer your questions,
A1. (ans to Q1) You can have different apps running on the same hostname + port as long as they are served through different url paths.

A2. (ans to Q2) Hm, I'm not sure what you mean by this. The proxy server lives on port 6010 in the example and forwards requests to a particular url based on the original request url path. e.g., in my examples, if the proxy server was running with hostname example.com and it received a request for http://example.com:6010/test/duck, the server would forward the request to http://localhost:8080/cool/duck.

See these tests for more examples of url path translation.

A3. (ans to Q3) You only need a total of one web service running at a minimum. You can think of http-proxy and http-proxy-rules as just normal node modules. They can run on top of an existing web service (e.g., an http server) or you can use the http-proxy module to spawn your own webserver by invoking .listen() on the proxy instance.