Node4ORDS

Simple node app to act as web listener to sit on top of Oracle Rest Data Services (ORDS) web container (such as Tomcat). This is an alternative to using an Apache web server.

This project was created as part of the Oracle XE / APEX VM install project: https://github.com/OraOpenSource/oraclexe-apex

Please note this is still in beta and additional changes will be coming.

Install

git clone https://github.com/OraOpenSource/node4ords.git
cd ./node4ords
npm install --unsafe-perm

Upgrade

To upgrade simply run

git pull
npm install --unsafe-perm

Check the latest docs to see if additional configuration options are available. Existing config.js files will not be modified

Config

The configuration for node4ords is stored in config.js. When installing Node4ORDS the first time this file will be created as a copy of defaultConfig.js.

The following is an explanation of all the settings

Setting	Required	Default	Description
config.web.http			HTTP config container
config.web.http.port	optional	80	Port for http connections
config.web.https	optional		HTTPS config container
config.web.https.enabled	required	false	Set to true to enable HTTPS connections
config.web.https.port	optional	443	Port for https connections
config.web.https.keyPath	required		Full path to SSL private key. Required only if HTTPS is enabled. Ex: /tmp/certs/domain.key
config.web.https.certPath	required		Full path to SSL certificate. Required only if HTTPS is enabled. Ex: /tmp/certs/domain.crt
config.web.https.forceHttps	optional	false	If true then all HTTP connections will be redirected to HTTPS
config.web.https.forceSSLPort	optional	config.web.https.port	If config.web.https.forceHttps is enabled then this port will be used for the redirect. In most cases 443 (the default) is appropriate. A different port is usually only required if running Node4ORDS on a VM and doing port mapping that maps 443 to a different (local) port.
config.ords			ORDS config container
config.ords.path	required		URL path for ORDS. Recommended /ords
config.ords.redirectPaths	optional		Array of paths to redirect. Ex: ['/apex'] will redirect all references to /apex to path set in config.ords.path. Useful for older URLs that may have used /apex or other paths to access APEX applications.
config.ords.webContainerUrl	required		local URL to Tomcat server. Most of the time this will be http://localhost:8080
config.apex			APEX config container
config.apex.images	required		APEX images container
config.apex.images.path	required		URL Path to APEX images. Recommended /i
config.apex.images.directory	required		Path on file system where APEX images are located. Ex: /ords/apex_images
config.static			Static www files container
config.static.path			Path to access static www files. Ex /public
config.static.directory			Filesystem location of where www static files are stored. Ex: /var/www/public

Run

node app.js

To start Node4ORDS as an system process it's recommended to use PM2. The following script demonstrates how to install PM2 and run Node4ORDS.

npm install pm2 -g

# Go to the directory that Node4ORDS is installed in or reference the full path
pm2 start app.js --name="node4ords" --watch

# To have it run on boot:
# pm2 startup <os type>. Ex pm2 startup redhat

# Save current setup
pm2 save

Static files

Once installed a directory called /var/www/public will be created. Static files can be placed in there and referenced from your server via //server_name/public/filename. You can configure the location for static content in config.js.

By default, the following folder structure will be created:

|-/public
	|-css
	|-img
	|-js

SSL

If you want to use SSL, the config.js supports SSL. A private and public key are required.

Unsigned Private key

The following demo shows how to quickly create an unsigned private key:

openssl req \
  -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout localhost.key \
  -x509 -days 365 -out localhost.crt \
  -subj "/C=CA/ST=Alberta/L=Calgary/O=Dis/CN=localhost"