My current project has a realtime part, using socket.io on nodejs, and a web part using django on nginx / gunicorn. Here’s a setup to put them both on the same port, and make them both go over SSL. I’m assuming you’re on Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I got this working last night, so no promises. You’ll certainly want to tweak haproxy’s config for performance. I also only tested it with socket.io’s web socket transport.

Overview

• stunnel decrypts the ssl, so everything after that doesn’t know about it. It decrypts both web traffic (HTTPS to HTTP), and web socket traffic (WSS to WS).
• haproxy sends web socket traffic to node and web traffic to nginx.
• node runs socket.io, handling the web socket traffic.
• nginx serves static content.
• gunicorn runs python / django, and there’s a database out back somewhere, but that’s not relevant here.

Currently nginx doesn’t