Getting Started with Node-Spdy Edge

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Last night I was able to confirm that express-spdy does not work with node.js installs that are built against older versions of openssl (i.e. those that lack NPN / Next Protocol Negotiation). I set off down the rabbit hole of trying to get exress-spdy to not install if it detected an older openssl, but was not able to get that working.

Tonight, I am abandoning that effort and instead following the advice of Fedor Indutny, node.js coder extraordinaire and author of the very excellent node-spdy package. He suggested that I drop my efforts in the node.js stable branch in favor of the unstable 0.7.x series. The 0.7.x bundles an NPN capable openssl. It has the additional benefit of node-spdy 1.0. I had planned on playing with that eventually. Now seems a good time.

So, in a temporary directory, I install node-spdy:

➜  tmp  cd    
➜  ~  cd ~/tmp
➜  tmp  mkdir node-spdy-test
➜  tmp  cd !$
➜  tmp  cd node-spdy-test
➜  node-spdy-test  which node
/home/chris/local/node-v0.7.7/bin/node
➜  node-spdy-test  npm install spdy     
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/spdy
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/spdy
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/spdy/-/spdy-1.2.0.tgz
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/spdy/-/spdy-1.2.0.tgz
spdy@1.2.0 ./node_modules/spdy

The, I define a simple server in app.js:

var spdy = require('spdy'),
    fs = require('fs');

var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/keys/jaynestown.key'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/keys/jaynestown.crt'),
  ca: fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/keys/jaynestown.csr')
};

var server = spdy.createServer(options, function(req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end('hello world!');
});

server.listen(3000);

And, lastly, I run that server:

➜  node-spdy-test  node app.js

Checking things out in the SPDY tab of Chrome's about:net-internals, I see a nice, legit SPDY session:

t=1334632829005 [st=   0]  SPDY_SESSION_PING
                           --> type = "sent"
                           --> unique_id = 3
t=1334632829005 [st=   0]  SPDY_SESSION_SYN_STREAM
                           --> flags = 1
                           --> accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
                               accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
                               accept-encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
                               accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8
                               cache-control: no-cache
                               host: jaynestown.local:3000
                               method: GET
                               pragma: no-cache
                               scheme: https
                               url: /
                               user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1096.1 Safari/536.6
                               version: HTTP/1.1
                           --> id = 5
t=1334632829011 [st=   6]  SPDY_SESSION_PING
                           --> type = "received"
                           --> unique_id = 3
t=1334632829048 [st=  43]  SPDY_SESSION_SYN_REPLY
                           --> flags = 0
                           --> status: 200 OK
                               version: HTTP/1.1
                           --> id = 5
...

Dang, that was nice and easy.

Day #358