Microchatter

is a backend server (subsystem) that you can easily integrate with your existing website so that users can have a mailbox and real-time chat.

Installation

Make sure you have the latest Node.js > 5.0 installed
download and install postgresql
sudo service postgresql start
git clone https://github.com/arisalexis/microchatter.git
cd microchatter; npm install
su - postgres
createdb microchatter
psql -d microchatter -f path_to_project/db/createTablesAndRoles.sql
edit the config file sample.json to default.json (and override it according to your environment)
npm test test/integration/**/*.js
export NODE_ENV=production
npm start or you can use PM2 with --node-args="-es_staging

If everything is OK proceed to the next section. planning to build a read Docker image to facilitate installation

Stack used

Node.js with the -es_staging flag
Express 4
Socket.io
Postgresql at least > 9.3x

Usage

Making a scalable chat is quite difficult. If you are planning to have millions of users probably this chat is not for you. Otherwise for medium sites and with a proper postgresql installation it will be fine. The system uses the powerfull postgresql Arrays to store messages so not many indices and joins are used.

The idea is to have a one to one relationship with all the users of your existing database to this database so integration takes minimal effort. Then you can use the system either by logging your client with basic auth or by using JWT (recommended) If you chose the basic auth method you can execute all requests with these credentials (only on HTTPS) or use the returned jwt token.

There are multiple ways to populate the database:

Use the rest admin interface and execute requests for every user on your system (slow)
The first time each user logins into the system with a valid JWT token (edit config file) the user will be created
Manually import into postgresql (table production.users) all usernames and passwords (using MD5)

bear in mind that all users must be in the database, you cannot have some users sending messages to others that don't exist

What can you do with it

This backend is totally front-end framework agnostic, you can use the REST server as you wish.

Send a message to another user (no brainer right?)
Display all conversations with other users in a chronological order and displaying how many unread messages you have
Block user & delete chat
Paginate messages for each chat
Get real-time messages and mark them as read
Add/Delete/Update users

Configuration

{
  "secure":true,
  "SSL":{
      "key":"keys/privkey.pem",
      "cert":"keys/cert.pem",
      "ca":"keys/chain.pem"
  },
  "port":8080,
  "emit":true,
  "redis":{
       "host":"172.17.0.1",
       "port":"6379",
       "password":null
  },
  "jwtSecret":"a secret",
  "postgresql":{
    "host":"localhost",
    "port":"5432",
    "user":"microchatter",
    "password":"micro123",
    "database":"microchatter",
    "schema":"production"
  }
}

secure: true/false for using SSL, you can easily obtain keys for free from letsencrypt
emit: true/false means that you will be using a redis database to emit events to the socket.io server vs running it embedded

Users and Passwords
1. psql -d microchatter
2. ALTER USER microchatter PASSWORD 'newpass'; (don't forget to update default.json too)
3. UPDATE production.users SET password=md5('newpass') WHERE username='admin' (default 'admin123')

REST API

Please take a look at the WIKI

Socket IO

Optional to the system, you can use the real-time feature.
You can use the socket.io client to connect to the server+port if you have emit:false or to your other socket.io server.

Each user has his own room listening and subscribed upon login.

New messages will be received with the event newMessage and an object of:

{ chat_id,
  message: {
    sender,
    tstamp,
    body
  }
}

Depending on where your user is, you may just want to display an alert for new received message.
If you are on the chats section and you don't have the chat_id loaded (it may be a new chat) then you need to get the chat details from the REST API.
If it is the current chat you can just add the new message to the list. It is good practice to then issue a call to the server that this chat is 'read'.

Contributing

Fork it!
Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
Please respect the .eslintrc file from ESLint project and use a compatible browser (eg. Atom)
Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
Submit a pull request :D

TODO

Group chats (can I have a pull request for this? :) code has been written with this in mind
Use session tokens from distributed cluster so user's don't have to login if you don't like jwt
More thorough testing (right now most test are integration style)
Stress test
Docker ready installation
Add Basic Auth to socket.io connection

History

Version 0.5 first public commit on github.

Credits

Aris Alexis Giachnis 2016

License

MIT License

arisAlexis / microchatter