Book Image

Socket.IO Cookbook

By : Tyson Cadenhead
Book Image

Socket.IO Cookbook

By: Tyson Cadenhead

Overview of this book

Socket.IO is a JavaScript library that provides you with the ability to implement real-time analytics, binary streaming, instant messaging, and document collaboration. It has two parts: a client-side library that runs in the browser, and a server-side library for node.js. Socket.IO is event-driven and primarily uses the WebSocket protocol that allows us to emit data bi-directionally from the server and the client. Socket.IO This book is a complete resource, covering topics from webSocket security to scaling the server-side of a Socket.IO application and everything in between. This book will provide real-world examples of how secure bi-directional, full-duplex connections that can be created using Socket.IO for different environments. It will also explain how the connection vulnerabilities can be resolved for large numbers of users and huge amounts of data/messages. By the end of the book, you will be a competent Socket.IO developer. With the help of the examples and real-world solutions,you will learn to create fast, scalable, and dynamic real-time apps by creating efficient messaging systems between the server side and the client side using Socket.IO.

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Socket.IO Cookbook
Tyson Cadenhead
Oct, 2015 | 184 pages
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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Socket.IO Cookbook
Socket.IO Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Wiring It Up
Wiring It Up
Introduction
Creating a Node HTTP server with Socket.IO
Creating an Express server with Socket.IO
Using Socket.IO as a cross-browser WebSocket
Debugging on the client
Debugging on the server
2
Creating Real-Time Dashboards
Creating Real-Time Dashboards
Introduction
Loading static data from the server
Creating a server-side clock
Loading data from MongoDB
Real-time analytics
Handling connection timeouts
3
Having Two-Way Conversations
Having Two-Way Conversations
Introduction
Creating a simple chat room
Managing the socket life cycle
Emitting a private message to another socket
Sending messages to all the sockets, except for the sender
Building a multiplayer tic-tac-toe game
4
Building a Room with a View
Building a Room with a View
Introduction
Creating chat channels with namespaces
Joining rooms
Leaving rooms
Listing rooms the socket is in
Creating private rooms
Setting up a default room
5
Securing Your Data
Securing Your Data
Introduction
Implementing basic authentication
Performing token-based authentication
Handling server-side validation
Locking down the HTTP referrer
Using secure WebSockets
6
Performing a Load Balancing Act
Performing a Load Balancing Act
Introduction
Performing load balancing with the Nginx server
Using the Node.js cluster
Using Redis to pass events between nodes
Using Memcached to manage multiple nodes
Using RabbitMQ to message events across nodes
7
Streaming Binary Data
Streaming Binary Data
Introduction
Broadcasting an image to other sockets
Uploading an image to the filesystem
Uploading an image to Amazon S3
Streaming audio
Streaming live video
8
Integrating with Mobile Applications
Integrating with Mobile Applications
Introduction
Throwing an alert when the socket connects
Pushing up data from the server
Responding to tap events from the device
Doing server-side pagination
Triggering hot deploys
Index
Index

Debugging on the server

The same debugging package that is available on the client side is available on the server as well.

The debugging option can be turned on with a Node environmental variable.

Getting ready

To get started with debugging on the server side, you will need to have Node and Socket.IO installed and an existing app that uses Socket.IO. To test this out, you can easily use any of the apps we built in the previous recipes in this chapter.

How to do it…

To get server-side debugging turned on, follow these steps:

  1. To enable debugging at the time when you start your server, simply include the DEBUG environmental variable as the first argument when you start your Node server, as shown in the following code:

    DEBUG=* node server

  2. If you would like to persist the DEBUG environmental variable without the need to pass it every time you start your Node server, you can export it ahead of time using the following code:

    export  DEBUG=*

  3. Now, when you start your server, verbose logging will be used with the following code:

    node server

  4. You can always update the DEBUG variable or even remove it completely by setting it to null, which will suppress logging entirely, as shown in the following code:

    export DEBUG=null

How it works…

Node.js environmental variables are available in process.env in any running Node process. They are often used to set up server-specific configurations, such as database connections and third-party credentials.

The great thing about using environmental variables to define the logging verbosity is that most cloud-based hosting providers allow you to change environmental variables on the fly, so you can easily toggle logging on or off without having to redeploy your code.

There's more…

Similar to client-side logging, you can set the logging type to something other than the wildcard. This allows you to only get debugging messages on the topic you want to listen to.

For example, listening for XHR requests is as simple as passing it to the environmental variables when you start your Node server with the following code:

DEBUG=socket.io:server node server
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