How to control where Meteor runs - amazon-ec2

Question

I'm installing Meteor (framework) on my AWS EC2 (micro) instance and followed the instructions and after creating a test project I ran meteor on that directory giving me the expected
[[[[[ /var/www/html/meteortest ]]]]]
Running on: http://localhost:3000/
But I can't navigate to my server's localhost in my browser to see the hello world example project. Is there a way I can make meteor work on something like :
http://mydomain.com/meteortest/
or
http://mydomain.com/meteortest:3000

Answer 1

The way that Meteor sets the ROOT URL is by using an environment variable called ROOT_URL:
http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_absoluteurl
So you could run your Meteor instance like so: ROOT_URL="http://mydomain.com/" meteor --port 80
However, if you want to have the meteor instance served from a folder (like http://mydomain.com/meteortest), you will have to use nginx to forward ports (see Tyr's example) but replace the line:
location / {
with:
location /meteortest {
and change your ROOT_URL appropriately. If you still can't access your domain from outside, you may have not set your security groups properly for EC2. You have to open up port 80. More information on how to do this can be here: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-network-security.html

Answer 2

You can setup nginx to proxy port 3000 to your domain. Something like:
server {
listen 80;
server_name meteortest.mydomain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/meteortest.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/tmeteortest.error.log;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
include /etc/nginx/proxy_params;
}
}
Please see http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule for more information.
However, running meteor on port 3000 is a development environment. If you want to use it in production, please run "meteor bundle", and then follow the README inside the generated tarball.

Answer 3

I think the problem is that port 3000 is likely blocked by amazon's firewall. You could look at opening it up, try Tyr's solution, or try just running meteor with
meteor --port 80
You may need root permissions (i.e. sudo) to do this.

Answer 4

Running directly on port 80 would require root privileges, which you don't really want your web server to run as -- starting it as root and deescalating to a regular user is possible, but not really ideal as well, as you may find that a programming bug at some time forgets to deescalate privs and you will not see any errors from that.
In many cases, I don't really want/need to run a load balancer to use multiple core, especially if I'm runnning on AWS single core t1 or t2 instance types, which I just scale out as I need them -- hence the best advice I have seen is to simply use the Linux kernels ability to do port forwarding, mapping port 80 to port 3000, like this
$ sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp \
--dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000
Nice and easy and nothing else to do -- and super efficient at the same time as no extra processes are involved in serving the requests.