Use a unique port for serving the presentation

[mojavelinux]

Both ports 8080 and 8000 are commonly used for web and application servers. There's no reason we should have to use either of these ports by default. Let's pick a unique "Bespoke" port and make that the default. Suggestions?

[mojavelinux]

@hsablonniere We should do the same in the generator.

[mraible]

What's a 4-digit number that means "I'm a presentation"? 1337 has been suggested for JHipster. Angular CLI uses 4200.

[mojavelinux]

Neat way to look at it!

For no particular reason, I like these numbers:

• 4092 - an occasional glitch in the game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time causes the Gossip Stones to say this number (this could play off our our SNES theme)
• 7070
• 4321 (middleman uses 4567, which is the opposite direction; but used by remote whois service)
• 7744
• 8128 (perfect number)
• 8833
• 4400

I don't want to overthink this, so let's try to arrive at something fairly soon ;)

[hasalex]

BTW, it would be nice to have it in a variable on top of the gulpfile.

[hsablonniere]

Hey!

I've been playing with this problem on an old side project. The solution we used in the end felt very nice : port chosen between 10000 and 19999 using the absolute path of the presentation on filesystem.

This is done like this :

// module
const MIN_PORT = 10000
const MAX_PORT = 19999
const PORT_SPREAD = MAX_PORT - MIN_PORT

function pathToPort() {

    // you need a sha1 (or other) function
    const sha1Path = sha1(process.cwd())
    const bigNumber = parseInt(sha1Path, 16)

    const integer = bigNumber % portSpread

    return minPort + integer
}

// usage
const port = pathToPort()

There's a log of params that can be changed, WDYT?

Cons :

• What do we do if it stumbles upon an already used port?

Pros :

• You can start several presentations at the same time without conflict
• You're sure that a given presentation on your FS will always have the same port

[mojavelinux]

I like the idea of a randomly chosen port, but I don't like ports that high. I think they are hard to read and remember. We should pick ports either from 4000 - 9999 IMHO