Using http.createServer is very low-level and really not useful for creating web applications as-is.
A good framework to use on top of it is Express, and I would seriously suggest using it. You can install it using npm install express.
When you have, you can create a basic application to handle your form:
var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var app = express();
//Note that in version 4 of express, express.bodyParser() was
//deprecated in favor of a separate 'body-parser' module.
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
//app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.post('/myaction', function(req, res) {
res.send('You sent the name "' + req.body.name + '".');
});
app.listen(8080, function() {
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/');
});
You can make your form point to it using:
<form action="http://127.0.0.1:8080/myaction" method="post">
The reason you can't run Node on port 80 is because there's already a process running on that port (which is serving your index.html). You could use Express to also serve static content, like index.html, using the express.static middleware.