AppHarbor adds node.js support

blog.appharbor.com

29 points·runesoerensen··7 comments

How does this compare to Heroku?

Neither seem to support WebSockets (though the Heroku article I found was a bit dated[1]) for the time being.

From the article, it seems like AppHarbor doesn't automagically pull in the dependencies from the package.json, which Heroku does.

Add-ons wise, there is a lot of overlap, but Heroku definitely has more at the moment.

Heroku lets you run one-off processes, which is nice for debugging. I couldn't find this functionality on AppHarbor.

[1]: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/6/22/the_new_heroku_2_n...

We (NodeSocket) support WebSockets since we provide full VPS servers with root access. Obviously though we are linux only, where AppHarbor is Windows.

AppHarbor uses nginx as a load balancer and it currently doesn't support HTTP/1.1 proxying with upstream servers, which is required for Websockets support. It was recently introduced in the development branch (v. 1.1.4 http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES) and should make it's way into the stable branch soon.

We (AppHarbor) are adding support for node.js on a beta-basis primarily to collect initial feedback from our users. Improved support for debugging node apps is certainly something we'll look into.

HTTP/1.1 doesn't mean WebSocket support (which nginx doesn't do right now).

Sorry about the confusion - didn't mean nginx would have WebSocket support when HTTP/1.1 proxying is supported. It seems like it's a necessary feature before it can happen though.

Here's the node.js chat application running on AppHarbor: http://nodejschat.apphb.com/

This makes my day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com