How To Create Secure WebSocket With Node.
JS
"ws" Module
Written on: Sat, 19 Aug 2017
by zackad
In this tutorial, we will create ssl enable websocket using ws module.
Requirements
nodejs with npm
certbot to generate ssl certificate from letsencrypt
Step 1 — Generating SSL Certificate
Assuming you use ubuntu 16.04 the step are following
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install certbot
If you’re using different system, please refer to this official documentation.
After certbot successfully installed, we can generate ssl certificate with command
sudo certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/html -d example.com -d www.domain.com
Otherwise, if we don’t want to use webroot plugin we can use –standalone flag to generate
ssl certificate.
Please make sure that port 443 is not being used when generating ssl
certificate using standalone mode. We can temporarily stopping
webserver/other process for using port 443 and start again webserver
when we done.
sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d example.com -d www.example.com
This command will generate a single certificate for domain example.com and
www.example.com. Now we can copy certificate file located in (usually)
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/ .
Step 2 — Create WebSocket Server Project
For now, lets create a project name secure-websocket in our home directory and initiating
nodejs project.
cd
mkdir secure-websocket
cd secure-websocket
npm init
# Fill all the necessary information
npm install ws --save
npm install fs --save
npm install https --save
All dependencies is ready, now we need to copy our ssl certificate so the application can
access it without superuser privileges.
# create directory to contain ssl certificate
mkdir ssl-cert
# copy ssl certificate to our project directory
sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem ssl-celt/fullchain.pem
sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem ssl-celt/privkey.pem
After ssl certificate is ready we can write our application code. Create a new file named
index.js and copy this code.
// Minimal amount of secure websocket server
var fs = require('fs');
// read ssl certificate
var privateKey = fs.readFileSync('ssl-cert/privkey.pem', 'utf8');
var certificate = fs.readFileSync('ssl-cert/fullchain.pem', 'utf8');
var credentials = { key: privateKey, cert: certificate };
var https = require('https');
//pass in your credentials to create an https server
var httpsServer = https.createServer(credentials);
httpsServer.listen(8443);
var WebSocketServer = require('ws').Server;
var wss = new WebSocketServer({
server: httpsServer
});
wss.on('connection', function connection(ws) {
ws.on('message', function incoming(message) {
console.log('received: %s', message);
ws.send('reply from server : ' + message)
});
ws.send('something');
});
To start websocket server run following command
nodejs index.js
We can test it with this chrome extension or other client to access wss://example.com:8443.
SSL
TUTORIAL
WEBSOCKET
Contact I'm a simple man. I do what I want and what I
zackad [dot] dev [at] gmail [dot] com could. Otherwise it's a trial and error.
