Listening Ports

When you run your application locally you typically test it in your browser by navigating to a page like http://localhost:3000/. The number after the colon is called a port. For most Node.js applications this port is 3000, for some it is 8080, but it can be any number between 1024 and 65535.

If you are using a high level framework, it will generally take care of this for you. For lower level frameworks, you likely have code such as the following, typically in a file named server.js or server.ts:

const hostname = "0.0.0.0";
const port = process.env.port || 3000;

app.listen(port, hostname, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});

If you don’t have this configured correctly, you may see messages like the following when you launch:

WARNING The app is not listening on the expected address and will not be reachable by fly-proxy.
You can fix this by configuring your app to listen on the following addresses:
  - 0.0.0.0:3000

Correcting the port

If you look for a file named fly.toml, you will see something like the following:

[http_service]
  internal_port = 3000
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 0
  processes = ["app"]

The number specified by internal_port needs to match the port used to start your application. It doesn’t matter whether you change your application or the contents of this file to make these numbers match.

Correcting the host

Another common problem is that the application is set up to listen only for connections originating from localhost instead of connections from the internet. If you have code like the above, change the value of hostname to either 0.0.0.0 or [::].

Other frameworks may require you to change command used to start your application:

• Fastify applications can be started using fastify start --address 0.0.0.0
• Gatsby applications can be started using npx gatsby server -H 0.0.0.0.

Exposing multiple ports

If you need to expose additional ports, you will need to add a services section for each additional port. Be sure to review our Public Network Services page before proceeding, in particular:

• If you want your port other than 80/443 to be available on IPv4 you will need to allocate a dedicated IPv4 address.
• If you want to take advantage of our TLS services, you will want to add “tls” to the list of connection handlers.