Node.js is not accessible from external IPs on Ubuntu

Question

I'm sure this is very noobish, so forgive me. I'm trying to run a node.js server on port 8080 of my ubuntu 10.04.

Here's the result of iptables -L on the server:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

And here's the result of nmap -p 8080 (edited the ip address because everything is or should be wide open)

nmap 173.203.xxx.xxx -p 8080 -A

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-05-19 22:52 PDT
Interesting ports on xxx (173.203.xxx.xxx):
PORT     STATE  SERVICE    VERSION
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Why on earth is 8080 seen as closed? Adding this did not help:

iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp  --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp  --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT

I'm really confused.

I'll add this, in case it helps, but I don't know

 netstat -pan | grep 80
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:8080          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN          16785/node      
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      16471/apache2

I can access my regular website running off of port 80 on apache, but the node.js server is inaccessible from outside. Accessing it from the server itself works fine.

So my question is: how would I go about debugging this? Could there be something else than iptables blocking some ports? How do I find out what it is?

Any help much appreciated!

To those who came here via Google: If you've hosted service on Google cloud and facing this issue, first **make sure you've added the port in the exception rules of [cloud firewall](https://console.cloud.google.com/networking/firewalls) as well as in the operating systems firewall** — Atul, Aug 10 '16 at 11:02

score 36 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '11 at 06:26

36

Thanks for adding the last netstat output, it really helped. You can't access node.js from outside because it is listening on localhost IP i.e 127.0.0.1. You need to configure node.js to listen on 0.0.0.0 so it will be able to accept connections on all the IPs of your machine.

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
    res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8080, "0.0.0.0");
console.log('Server running at http://0.0.0.0:8080/');

answered May 20 '11 at 06:26

Hameedullah Khan

751
4
7

I suspected that, but never came across a 0.0.0.0 before, so disregarded it. I applied your fix, and that did it, thanks! – Mikael Gramont May 20 '11 at 06:39
I also have this problem. I followed this code but my nodejs server is still not accessible from outside. – cyberquarks Nov 05 '11 at 02:44
Yeah, same here. – Sep 13 '13 at 07:55
2

didn't work for me – Jitendra Pancholi Dec 01 '16 at 10:19
Didn't work for me on MacOS Sierra with Node v8.1.3 – Liran H Aug 11 '17 at 23:07
If i have to configure it to get access from a particular single ip like x.x.x.x – Pankaj Cheema Mar 17 '20 at 07:00

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 20 '11 at 06:19

5

According to your netstat output, port 8080 is open only for 127.0.0.1 which is localhost, hence accessing from the server works (which is localhost), but not from anywhere else.

The right output should look like

0.0.0.0:8080

answered May 20 '11 at 06:19

freethinker

336
1
8

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 05 '17 at 12:46

I had the same Issue.

I did the following

In Google Cloud Console you need enable ports which you are using for Nodejs
use following link to enable same ports on Ubuntu Server https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-14-04
And after this last one what I was missing is Networking -> Firewall Rules -> default-allow-internal ->all IP address 0.0.0.0/0

see this image

Done

Node.js is not accessible from external IPs on Ubuntu

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