One of the things that really got me on board with NodeJS was the idea that I didn’t need a host container for it. Building a web app just means including a library that listens for HTTP requests on a port and respond. No more Apache! One less thing to worry about that isn’t my app!

And then it starts getting complicated.

For a start, port 80 is a privileged port, so when you try to launch the app to test or develop on your own machine you need to do so with sudo. That’s a little annoying, but you could default to port 80 & allow an override. But now you are adding more code to workaround it.

And what about SSL? If you are going to use SSL in production (and you should) then your code is going to have to know about that too and read the certs and set that up. And that’s even more annoying for development, anyone working on your code is going to have to create their own certs just to launch your app. Unless you code in more workarounds.

So that’s a suddenly a lot of code you are maintaining which might create its own problems.

The alternative … use a webserver as a proxy for your app in production. It doesn’t have to be Apache, you could use Nginx for example. I use Apache because I’m reasonably familiar with it.