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bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 PointsPreviewing NodeJS workspace
Created a new NodeJS workspace. Created a index.html, added paragraph text. When I click the preview icon, page in the port I chose says "Workspace Unavailable". Why?
snapshot - https://w.trhou.se/jtobsd155f
6 Answers
Nathan Williams
Python Web Development Techdegree Student 6,851 PointsNodeJS workspaces aren't meant to work with static files, they're meant to allow you to preview a running nodejs backend server, so unless you have one running, you get an error page because there's no backend server listening to the port you specified.
bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 PointsOk, guess I was expecting there to be web-based previews with workspaces.
Nathan Williams
Python Web Development Techdegree Student 6,851 Pointsthere are, if you pick an appropriate environment as your workspace type when you're creating it. Try picking the "Front End" environment.
bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 PointsWe can't test out any interaction / connection between front-end and back-end environments in a web-based preview though?
bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 Points*unless the backend is our own
Nathan Williams
Python Web Development Techdegree Student 6,851 PointsTo confirm, you're thinking of something like running a nodejs api service listening on port 3000 or something, and serving a static HTML file over the default web port (80) with some javascript that talks to the nodejs server on port 3000?
bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 PointsI want to click a button in html and see how that can trigger a function in NodeJS.
Nathan Williams
Python Web Development Techdegree Student 6,851 Points"trigger a function in NodeJS" on the client-side (in the browser), or server-side (on the backend)?
If the former, just use a Front End workspace environment, the NodeJS environment doesn't run a web-server to serve static HTML, so you'd have to run your own (with something like express); if the latter (frontend talking to a custom backend), I'll have to dig around a bit to see if that can be achieved with our current workspaces setup, or if we'd need to make some changes to workspaces.
bp1
Courses Plus Student 47 PointsI realize NodeJS doesn't run client-side. I'm missing how to bind front-end events to a NodeJS backend function and pass data to one too. That must not be a common requirement if an example is not implemented here already.
Nathan Williams
Python Web Development Techdegree Student 6,851 PointsYeah, I can definitely see the use-case, I just don't think we've delivered a course that requires it yet; fwiw you can serve the frontend code via the backend service at a different route as-is, so there's a couple ways to achieve what you're aiming for. I'll open a feature request on our end to get a static webserver able to run in tandem with Workspaces based on the Node environment, but I can't say for sure when we may be able to make the requisite changes.