Can you use cloudflare or any other free CDN with nodebb?

James NotAvailable

So does anyone have cloudflare setup with nodebb.
Cloudflare does not support websockets which nodebb uses so can you use a cf cdn or any cdn for that matter with a subdomain for socket.io?

julian

We use cloudflare simply for the routing... as they don't support websockets, nothing we can do there

James NotAvailable

how do yo u do that? could you post a small tut or something. i'm sure people would like to use cf with nodebb.

julian

Hi James, no tutorial required, I just set up cloudflare as I normally would with anything, except I turn off caching (and flip the orange cloud to grey):

I also set the performance profile to "CDN Only":

bentael

@julian what is the value of cloudflare if caching is turned off? would it still be taking the traffic hits off your servers?

julian

@bentael I just use CloudFlare for its superior interface and its routing. Sure beats any domain host's DNS interface, in my opinion, and it relieves me from having to maintain a BIND9 server.

People have tried turning on rocketcache before, which just ended up mangling the already minified JS. It might work, I haven't tried recently...

Of course, also keep in mind that if you use CF cache, that's another caching layer on top of what is already present, which makes... 3:

NodeBB CSS/js cache
Browser cache
Cloudflare cache

trevor

I use Varnish for CSS/JS/FONT/IMAGE caching only.

julian

@trevor Do you have time to write a guide on setting it up? Please note you should also use varnish for RSS feeds, as they are no longer saved in /feeds, and are generated on the fly.

trevor

Damn, I forgot all about the RSS.

meetdilip

I had lot of issues when I used CloudFlare on my forum. Members were complaining that they often get a page that site is offline message from Cloudflare. I turned it off and all is well.

datz

I just use CloudFlare for its superior interface and its routing.

@julian no silly. https://dnsimple.com - way better pricing and interface.

leo

@datz CloudFlare is completely free if you only use it for DNS hosting.

julian

Hehe -- can't beat free...!

tparnell

If you want some scalable DDOS mitigation, and CDN style caching you could implement Squid servers on EC2 that are set to auto scale when the traffic gets heavy.....

however this solution is not free....

As far as CloudFlare goes, I have had issues in the past (not just with nodeBB, but other services) where they have returned 500 errors, because their infrastructure went down...

All depends on what you are looking for, I will note that linode does have pretty good DNS management.

finid

@tparnell

At about the time I was considering using CloudFlare, I started seeing a lot of these types of errors. Enough times that I made a point to take of screenshot for evidence.

Chris

I use CloudFlare DNS as well - have for quite some time. Probably the best (especially for free) anycast dns provider out there..

scottalanmiller

We have a number of users that are reporting issues that I think are related to caching with websockets. We use CloudFlare for all of our sites except for our NodeBB setup. End user networks with Untangle seem to have the websockets issue, at least that is my guess. It is my guess that Untangle is caching and killing websockets.

scottalanmiller

@leo said:

@datz CloudFlare is completely free if you only use it for DNS hosting.

Also free for basic CDN. Only the advanced features require payment.

leo

@scottalanmiller said:

@leo said:

@datz CloudFlare is completely free if you only use it for DNS hosting.

Also free for basic CDN. Only the advanced features require payment.

Unfortunately, you need to pay for SSL (you need to upgrade) if you want to use their CDN...

miksago

As for fronting your entire forum with a CDN, I'm not sure, but as for images and other assets, you could write a plugin to generate the correct image urls based on CDN configuration (such that the image urls fetched are CDN-enabled, but the urls stored are standard)