Socket.IO - require is not defined

Question

I\'m trying to get socket.io working but now in Chrome I get the error:

Uncaught ReferenceError: require is not defined

client.php:9

Answer 1

Actually I was successful in getting Apache to serve up these files, today in fact.

Simply create a copy (I actually copied the files, soft links might be ok I did not try) of the contents of node_modules/socket.io/node_modules/socket.io-client/dist to your web root. For my install of socket.io (0.9.16) where I installed socket.io globally these two commands did the trick:

sudo cp -av /usr/lib/node_modules/socket.io/node_modules/socket.io-client/dist /var/www/socket.io 
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/socket.io

This was on a Ubuntu 13.10 box the usual LAMP stack installed before I then added node.js.

Now keeping this copy in sync as new versions of socket.io are released is a problem I have not yet tried to address yet.

Cheers

Answer 2

As others have noted, when io is run on the server side, an "automagical" service of "socket.io.js" is served - and it branches out to the other js files in its lib directory.

What I wish to add, is that This is Not Intutive and, no, you cannot have your regular webserver serve this file - the errors just get more strange and seemingly contradictory (require not defined, etc). This is not a normal js file, and I wish all the tutorials out there would emphasize that.

Anyhow, if you are running behind nginx, for example, set the port-settings to the same port assigned for node - port 3000 in my case. I used that port in the client like this:

  <script src="http://localhost:3000/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>

... and then also used port 3000 in the server code - there are too many ways / versions you can code the server-js-code for an example to do anything but confuse most who are using 'a different way'.