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

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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.

Contents

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

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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