How to connect a web site to a geth node?

Question

Before the DApp-browser Mist was available, this web3 library seems the way to go on building a bridge from contract to a frontend (web site).

But, I cannot get the very basic examples to work.

These sources lack a few major points:

1. What is the exact command to start geth to run the examples? I have used:

   geth --rpc console 2
   

   while mining etc.

2. This example has the line:

   web3.setProvider(new web3.providers.HttpProvider());
   

   Should it be localhost?

   web3.setProvider(new web3.providers.HttpProvider('http://localhost:8545'));
   

3. Is there anyway to hide web3.setProvider and other JavaScript code from the page source viewable for the user? If the geth node address is public, that could be a security problem.

Maybe I'm asking obvious questions here, but it shouldn't be too much trouble to add at least the geth starting argument to the tutorials. The best case scenario would be to have step by step guide with no assumptions left blank.

Answer 1

For point number one, this should work:
geth --rpc --rpccorsdomain="*" console 2>> geth.log
Running --rpccorsdomain="*" is dangerous though, especially if you have unlocked accounts. Put your domain name instead of *. For localhost, add --rpcaddr="localhost"

Answer 2

To add to Ethan Wilding's answer, for safely testing locally you can use the --dev flag and connect to the node with username 'test' and password 'test'.

So the geth command for testing becomes:
geth --dev --rpc --rpccorsdomain="*" --rpcaddr="localhost"

[caution: you should only use these flags for local dev mode testing, never on a real network]

And connecting the web3.js client is:
web3.setProvider(web3.providers.HttpProvider(null, 0, 'test', 'test'));
where null sets the host to http://localhost:8545 and 0 disables the timeout

Once that's done the sample code will connect to the the local node, although there's a good chance (at least for now) that a lot of samples won't work because they don't seem to be up-to-date. But web3.js/example/balance.html works nicely.