Experiment with Node.js Website Traffic on Vercel

[ovflowd]

Hey you all 👋 as our ongoing efforts to improve the reliability and performance of the Website. The nodejs.org website codebase reached maturity for us to start the cutoff tests for serving the Website related routes through Vercel.

Useful Information

• The Website is served on https://node-js-org.vercel.app
• The Website is automatically deployed to Vercel by Vercel Integration on https://vercel.com
• An ideal subdomain for this temporary experiment is https://vercel.nodejs.org

Important Notes

• Cloudflare cache should be disabled for all routes served by Vercel. Vercel has its own caching rules, and those might conflict with Vercel-ones
• After analysing our NGINX file, the following subdirectories should not be served to Vercel:
  • /dist
  • /download
  • /docs
  • /api
  • /documentation
  • /metrics
  • /github-webhook.log
  • /traffic-manager
• Vercel should serve all other routes

Miscellaneous Information

• In the future, api/ should be served by the website, as the latest API docs will be served and built directly from the website repository. But that's a topic for another time.
• Once we adopt Vercel, over time, we can update the NGINX config to remove some of thew website-specific configurations we had.

[targos]

As a first step, I created the DNS entry:

Next: figure out how to make the SSL config happy

[ovflowd]

I guess here are some docs: https://vercel.com/guides/using-cloudflare-with-vercel

[ovflowd]

Pretty much:

Set the target on your CNAME to cname.vercel-dns.com instead of node-js-org.vercel.app and ensure SSL mode is set to full!

[ovflowd]

Oh, it looks like it solved by itself, @targos when I added it on https://vercel.com > settings > domains, but I guess you can still update the CNAME so it becomes happy (and agnostic to the default .vercel.app domain)

[targos]

Updated the cname to cname.vercel-dns.com.
Now for the subdirectories that shouldn't be forwarded to Vercel, I don't really know what to do.
I found this documentation, but the feature is only available to Enterprise users (which we are not).

[ovflowd]

@jasnell if you can help us out here 🤔

[ovflowd]

cc @richardlau let me know once you have updates :)

[richardlau]

@ovflowd I've added a Redirect Rule in Cloudflare for the URLs that should not be served to Vercel:

(http.host eq "vercel.nodejs.org" and http.request.uri.path matches "^/(dist|download|docs|api|documentation|metrics|github-webhook.log$/traffic-manager)(\\/.*)*")

[ovflowd]

Hey @richardlau is the expression correct for the traffic-manager part? 🤔

[richardlau]

I've added a (now corrected) Redirect Rule in Cloudflare for the URLs that should not be served to Vercel:

(http.host eq "vercel.nodejs.org" and http.request.uri.path matches "^/(dist|download|docs|api|documentation|metrics|github-webhook.log$|traffic-manager)(\\/.*)*")

[ovflowd]

Hmm @richardlau I see that the redirects would work as long as the "vercel" website is not on the main domain (nodejs.org)

As I can see that it is redirecting https://vercel.nodejs.org to -> nodejs.org

Afaik the intent is that for anything from X routes it goes to one server and the others would go to another server.