This project provides a Node.js package that lets you use Windows Azure Service Bus as a back-end communications channel for socket.io applications.

• Service Bus Store
  • Easily connect multiple socket.io server instances over Service Bus

To get the source code of the SDK via git just type:

git clone https://github.com/WindowsAzure/socket.io-servicebus
cd ./socket.io-servicebus

You can install the azure npm package directly.

npm install socket.io-servicebus

First, set up your Service Bus namespace. Create a topic to use for communications, and one subscription per socket.io server instance. These can be created either via the Windows Azure portal or programmatically using the Windows Azure SDK for Node.

Then, configure socket.io to use the Service Bus Store:

var sio = require('socket.io');
var SbStore = require('socket.io-servicebus');

var io = sio.listen(server);
io.configure(function () {
  io.set('store', new SbStore({
    topic: topicName,
    subscription: subscriptionName,
    connectionString: connectionString
  }));
});

The connection string can either be retrieved from the portal, or using our powershell / x-plat CLI tools. From here, communications to and from the server will get routed over Service Bus.

The current version (0.0.1) only routes messages; client connection state is stored in memory in the server instance. Clients need to consistently connect to the same server instance to avoid losing their session state.

Be sure to check out the Windows Azure Developer Forums on Stack Overflow if you have trouble with the provided code.

If you would like to become an active contributor to this project please follow the instructions provided in Windows Azure Projects Contribution Guidelines.

If you encounter any bugs with the library please file an issue in the Issues section of the project.

For documentation on how to host Node.js applications on Windows Azure, please see the Windows Azure Node.js Developer Center.

For documentation on the Azure cross platform CLI tool for Mac and Linux, please see our readme [here] (http://github.com/windowsazure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat)

Check out our new IRC channel on freenode, node-azure.