An IRC like chat system written in Node.js

Demo

Basic demo is available Here.

Why?

I had a spare Raspberry Pi and I wanted to use it! One of ideas in my head was to have your own on-premise chat server that you can use for cheap and own your data (< $50 hardware) forever and free!

Requirements

For compiling you need:

Node 8+ (with npm5)
libsqlite3
OpenSSL 1.x.x (for uWebsockets)
zlib 1.x (for uWebsockets)
libuv 1.3+ or Boost.Asio 1.x (both optional on Linux)

You can use following commands to install them:

Fedora: sudo dnf install openssl-devel zlib-devel
Homebrew: brew install openssl zlib libuv
Vcpkg: vcpkg install openssl zlib libuv and/or vcpkg install openssl:x64-windows zlib:x64-windows libuv:x64-windows

Once you have installed dependencies above just do npm install && gulp (creates a dist folder that you can upload to your machine). Project can run on almost any machine that nodejs supports. I have successfully tested it on Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi etc.

Configurations

You can use a .env file or environment variables to configure the server, here are the environment variables you can change:

RC_URL (default http://localhost:3000/) Raspchat URL where server would start listening
DB_PATH (default chat-log.db) Database path for SQLite database
WS_URL (default ws://localhost:3000/chat) Websocket URL if you are running it behind some proxy
WSS_URL (default wss://localhost:3000/chat) Websocket secure URL if you are running it behind some proxy

You can read about .env file here

Features:

Basic GIF support
Basic nick support
Channel (join/leave/list-members) support
Markdown support
Message history on group join

Pending:

Refactor frontend using hyperapp
Scrollable history
Unit tests
Introduce admin panel with:
- Reserved alias authorization
- IP limiting/banning
- Fixed alias with passwords

elonchen / raspchat