How to install Node.js for Orangescrum In-App Chat

In our continuous efforts to simplify the installation process for Orangescrum, we’re constantly updating installation instructions for our users.

In this article, I will guide you on how to install the Node.js for an In-App Chat add-on on your Orangescrum server.

Important Massage to our Open-source, Enterprise & Add-on Users
We discontinued the Add-on Selling from Nov 1, 2021 and the Add-on Support will be discontinued from Feb, 2022. Any user want to use our On-Premise Solution are recommended to migrate into Orangescrum Self-Hosted plan.

What is Node.js?

Node.js official document says “Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast and scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices”.

Node.js is an open source, a cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side and networking applications. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript and can be run within the Node.js runtime on OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.

Node.js also provides a rich library of various JavaScript modules which simplifies the development of web applications using Node.js to a great extent.

Why we choose Node.js?

Following are some of the important features that make Node.js the first choice of software architects.

• Asynchronous and Event Driven? All APIs of the Node.js library are asynchronous, that is, non-blocking. It essentially means a Node.js-based server never waits for an API to return data. The server moves to the next API after calling it and a notification mechanism of Events of Node.js helps the server to get a response from the previous API call.
• Very Fast? Being built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript Engine, the Node.js library is very fast in code execution.
• Single Threaded but Highly Scalable? Node.js uses a single threaded model with event looping. The event mechanism helps the server to respond in a non-blocking way and makes the server highly scalable as opposed to traditional servers which create limited threads to handle requests. Node.js uses a single threaded program and the same program can provide service to a much larger number of requests than traditional servers like Apache HTTP Server.
• No Buffering? Node.js applications never buffer any data. These applications simply output the data in chunks.
• License? Node.js is released under the MIT license.

You can read more about Node.js here.

Installing Node.js

There are 6 simple steps to install Node.js on your server. These are as follows:

• Download Node.js from here.
• Install Node.js and NPM

   yum install npm node.js

   yum –enablerepo=epel install npm node.js

   yum install gcc-c++ make

    yum install openssl-devel

• Install socket.io using NPM

    npm install socket.io

• Install Forever

    npm install forever -g

• Run the notification.js (given with the In-App chat) file forever using the “Forever”. (it should not stop)
• Upload the node js file and go to that path

  cd /var/www/html/orangescrum

Note:  You can find the notification.js file in the Orangescrum folder

• After following all the above steps, please copy and paste the “notification.js” file (given with the chat add-on) in the same directory where the node_modules is installed
• Run the below command to start node.js.

forever start notification.js

Note: 

You must Disable firewalld/Selinux service by the command:

service firewalld stop / setenforce 0

or

Start the firewall service:

service firewalld start

Added the node port 3002 on firewall rules

firewall-cmd –permanent –add-port=3002/tcp

Reload the firewall service:

firewall-cmd –reload

To list all Firewall rules

firewall-cmd –list-all

Now node server is ready. You can test by checking the below URL

http://your-domain:3002

Ex. http://localhost:3002

http://127.0.0.1:3002

http://myorange.com:3002

If the output is “Welcome to socket.io.” then node.js is working fine and you can use that URL in the constant.php as “NODE_HOST”

Note: you can find notification.js, node-js-installation-linux.pdf, and node-js-installation-windows.pdf files in the Orangescrum folder after installing the In-App chat.

Let us know if you have faced any issues with the installation of Node.js. We would love to solve it for you!

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