The NodeBB Config (config.json)

The majority of NodeBB's configuration is handled by the Administrator Control Panel (ACP), although a handful of server-related options are defined in the configuration file (config.json) located at NodeBB's root folder.

Some of these values are saved via the setup script:

• url is the full web-accessible address that points to your NodeBB. If you don't have a domain, an IP address will work fine (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:4567). Subfolder installations also define their folder here as well (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:4567/forum)
• secret is a text string used to hash cookie sessions. If the secret is changed, all existing sessons will no longer validate and users will need to log in again.
• database defines the primary database used by NodeBB. (e.g. redis or mongo) -- for more information, see Configuring Databases <databases>
• Both redis and mongo are hashes that contain database-related connection information, they contain some or all of the following:
  • host
  • port
  • uri (MongoDB only connection string)
  • username (MongoDB only)
  • password
  • database

The following values are optional, and override the defaults set by NodeBB:

• port (Default: 4567) Specifies the port number that NodeBB will bind to. You can specify an array of ports and NodeBB will spawn port.length processes. If you use multiple ports you need to configure a load balancer to proxy requests to the different ports.
• bcrypt_rounds (Default: 12) Specifies the number of rounds to hash a password. Slower machines may elect to reduce the number of rounds to speed up the login process, but you'd more likely want to increase the number of rounds at some point if computer processing power gets so fast that the default # of rounds isn't high enough of a barrier to password cracking.
• upload_path (Default: /public/uploads) Specifies the path, relative to the NodeBB root install, that uploaded files will be saved in.

• jobsDisabled This can be added to disable jobs that are run on a certain interval.

  • For example "jobsDisabled":true will disable daily digest emails and notification pruning. This option is useful for installations that run multiple NodeBB backends in order to scale. In such a setup, only one backend should handle jobs, and the other backends would set jobsDisabled to true.

• socket.io A hash with socket.io settings :

  • transports (Default: ["polling", "websocket"]) Can be used to configure socket.io transports.
  • address (Default: "") Address of socket.io server can be empty
  • origins (Defaults to url in config.json on all ports) Defined a different url for socket.io connections, in the format domain.tld:port (e.g. example.org:*)

• bind_address (Default: 0.0.0.0, or all interfaces) Specifies the local address that NodeBB should bind to.

  • By default, NodeBB will listen to requests on all interfaces, but when set, NodeBB will only accept connections from that interface.

• sessionKey (Default: express.sid) Specifies the session key to use.