Can one application with one server serve websockets and http traffic? - ruby-on-rails

Question

Is this somehow possible? Is it possible to do something like this in Ruby on top of Rack? I've seen there's websockets-rack but as far as I understand, that is only a rack module to serve ONLY websocket traffic not http also.
So basically, as the question states, is it possible to serve both protocols with just one server on the same port, instead of firing of something like Faye, websockets-rack or em-websockets?

Answer 1

Websockets are just an in-protocol upgrade of HTTP(s), so they are not normal TCP sockets but reuse the existing HTTP(S) connection (and thus use the same port). So, in theory it should work and from what I know it works with the Perl Mojolicious framework. But I don't know if it works work ruby/rack.

Answer 2

The short answer is - (AFAIK) no.
Currently, a ruby HTTP server (like rails or sinatra) and a websocket server are mutually exclusive.
After saying that, you could use a third party to emulate that. Specifically Ngnix. With Nginx you can listen to a single port, but, accroding to a path, decide whether you want to dispatch the request to the HTTP server or the Websocket server.
For example, you can run the HTTP server on port 3000, and the Websocket server on port 3020, and then configure the nginx.conf like this:
upstream http_app {
server 127.0.0.1:3000;
}
upstream websocket_app {
server 127.0.0.1:3020;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name .example.com;
access_log /var/www/myapp.example.com/log/access.log;
error_log /var/www/myapp.example.com/log/error.log;
root /var/www/myapp.example.com;
index index.html;
location /web {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://http_app;
}
location /socket {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://websocket_app;
}
}
Now any request to http://www.example.com/web/... will reach the HTTP server, and any request to http://www.example.com/socket will reach the Websocket server.