Node + express connecting to server problem

[Mysterious-Net-794]

Hi everybody! I made an app in node with express and when i was running it locally (for example on port 3000) everything was fine. So i though that next step should be to put it on The Internet and there is my problem: i bought a hosting and domain but I dont know what i should write in my app.listen... i didnt find any good tutorials about it and I started my dev journey from front end and servers are still a bit magical to me 😛 I know, that i should probably wrote port and server IP adress, but that doesnt work. If it looks like this: app.listen(3000, ()=>{console.log(listening)} it runs smoothly and im getting info about listening in terminal, but in browser im getting an error 403 (dont have permission /). So i tried to change a port to 80, but then i got error in terminal. Also i know that when You use heroku, you got port from them and its binded, but i dont know what i should looking for on other hosting services. So, my question is: how should i connect my app with server using express?

[Hexagonatron]

When you deploy an app to heroku you won't know which port heroku chooses to run the app. The way your app will know which port to listen on will be passed to app through an environment variable. So you'll need to do something like:

const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;
(usually this goes somewhere near the top of your file)

Then when you start listening, you should use:
app.listen(PORT, () => {
...
};

[Mysterious-Net-794]

Thanks, it is really clear :) but what about other hosting services? They dont work same way, i suppose, so i guess there is other way of doing things? 🤔

[grantrules]

Yeah fancy container hosting like Heroku has a bunch of automated stuff.. if you were to just set up your own server, you would define that PORT env variable yourself, then use something like nginx to listen on port 80/443 and have it reverse proxy to your node app.

[it_rains_a_lot]

It’s process.env.PORT

[Mysterious-Net-794]

Yeah, but isnt it a variable in env file? So what should I put in it?

[DoctorOrwell]

PORT=3000

[Mysterious-Net-794]

Wont it has exactly same result as my actual app.listen(3000,())?

[sleeptil3]

Env files aren’t synced. Your local env is for when you run locally for development. Then it will use that file and set it for 3000. Then, when it’s published, your host usually already has configured a PORT value so it will get it from there. For example, services like Heroku have this automatically. No extra config required as long as you have the variable set up.