Following the Usage Tutorial

[lilacsnacc]

Hello!

First off, I love your work. I honestly believe this is the future. That said, I'm having troubles getting past basic deployment.

The Usage tutorial in the readme shows a straight up geckos server (no express or anything else, just the sockets). This is exactly what I need! My site is hosted statically on Firebase and I want to keep it there. The tutorial works locally, I love it! But I've had no luck getting it to work in production. I've tried Docker, DigitalOcean, and GAE, all to no avail.

So my question is: Have you ever been able to run a geckos.io server without serving HTML? And actually connect to it from another domain? Any advice you could spare will be appreciated <3

[lilacsnacc]

I found the solution! Running on DigitalOcean, but this is reproducable in any Linux server environment.

1. Make sure your server code works locally, then (optional / recommended) put it in a repo. Be ready to get the repo's URL
2. So, set up your droplet / instance / server / whateva as long as it's an Ubuntu Linux server, and open the server's console (or SSH in)
3. Now my server came with Node v12 by default, which won't do:
   1. Run node -v and if the version is greater than v16, you're good. Skip to the next step
   2. Otherwise, run npm install -g n to install the Node.js version manager
   3. Then run sudo n stable to replace your current Node with the latest stable release (will be > v16)
4. Clone your repo using git clone your_repo_url, or SFTP in and copy paste your server code
5. Now in the terminal, navigate into your new folder with cd repo_location
6. For me, DigitalOcean has UFW enabled by default. For now, disable it with sudo ufw disable (we will readd the firewall later)
   • If you are using some other firewall on the server, you should maybe disable that too (dw, you'll reinstate it later)
7. Now if you npm start or node . your code should start running.
8. Let's update the client code:
   1. Get your server's ipv4 address (technically the url) and which port your code runs on (the port)
   2. In the client code, when you initialize geckos use geckos({url: 'http://server_address', port: server_port})
   3. if your geckos server is the same as your web server (like it serves the html), you should be able to omit the url portion
9. That's it! Your client should now successfully connect to the live server. But wait there's more (strongly recommended)
10. Let's make it a proper process!
    1. CTRL+C If you're still running the geckos server, terminate the process.
    2. In the terminal, from the server code's directory, run pm2 start server_file_name (this was index.js for me)
    3. run pm2 save to make it official. Your code should now be running in the background
       • Check with pm2 list, and make sure your client code is still working
11. Let's get our firewall back up! Your inbound rules should look something like this:

Type	Protocol	Port Range	Sources
SSH	TCP	22	All IPv4 All IPv6
Custom	TCP	8081	All IPv4	<-- use your server port instead of 8081
Custom	UDP	1024-65530	All IPv4

• Keep in mind this is JUST for the server with geckos. Other services may require other ports enabled.
• For explanation, TCP port 22 lets you SSH and do terminal commands, TCP port 8081 is the port my server / geckos is running on, and UDP Ports 1024-65530 are the ports geckos.io will randomly assign incoming connections to.
• Using DigitalOcean, you can go to Networking > Firewalls and create a firewall with the relevant rules. Then in the Droplets tab in the upper-middle portion of the same page, assign your droplet. Or if you got it like that, configure the ufw settings in the terminal and reenable ufw.

I tried to make this as clear as possible. @yandeu if you see any mistakes or have suggestions, please lmk and I'll fix it.
Cheers! 💖🎉

[lilacsnacc]

for reference, my code look summ like this:

import geckos from '@geckos.io/server'

const io = geckos({cors: {allowAuthorization: true}})

io.onConnection(channel => {
  console.log(`new connection! (${channel.id})`)

  channel.onDisconnect(() => console.log(`bye felicia! (${channel.id})`))
  
  io.emit('msg', `new friend: ${channel.id}`)
  channel.emit('msg', 'hi')
})

const port = process.env.PORT || 8081
io.listen(port)

the process.env.PORT only matters if you specifiy a PORT in the environment (like through yaml / terminal commands). I could remove that port line and say io.listen(8081), and nothing would change.