Avoiding Port Conflicts in GRPC Server

Question

I am currently looking at GRPC for my real time needs.

I noticed in the examples that we are explicitly required to bind to an hardcoded port in the Server.

I hope to deploy the Server on a Stack like Heroku.

Imagine I set the port to 9090 and that port is currently in use by another service won't that cause issues?

I was expecting a dynamic port allocation as encouraged by process.env.PORT

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You are not explicitly required to bind to a hardcoded port. The example shows how to use the Server API, including binding to a port. You can still modify the code to address your own use case. If you want to, you can use the value of process.env.PORT instead of hardcoding a port number. Or you even use the common convention of using process.env.PORT || 9090 as the port number to have a default.

Alternatively, you can use a port number of 0, which will instruct the operating system to select an unused port for you. The chosen port number will be the return value if you are using bind, or the second argument to the callback if you are using bindAsync.