Chateau

A multi-channel chat application inspired by a mashup of medieval grey and old school instant messaging.

Build Frameworks

Chateau uses Grunt to run the development server.

Project Objectives

Users can view a list of channels.
Users can enter a specific channel to view its chat history.
Users can create new channels.
Users can send messages in a given channel.
Users can create a username from which to send messages.

Setup and Configuration

A development version of this app can be run by cloning the repository, installing dependencies, and then running Grunt's default task.

$ git clone https://github.com/jestann/chateau.git <chateau>
$ npm install
$ grunt

This runs a server on port 8080 with live reloading for development. It copies files to the dist directory which it serves using Grunt Hapi based on HapiJS.

Database Authentication

Note: This repository uses environment variables to populate the config.js file, which initializes against the Firebase database.

To run this app, developers must create a config.js file with their own Firebase authentication information or populate environment variables as given in the existing config.js:

var config = {
            apiKey: process.env.APIKEY,
            authDomain: process.env.AUTH_DOMAIN,
            databaseURL: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
            storageBucket: process.env.STORAGE_BUCKET,
            messagingSenderId: process.env.MESSAGING_SENDER_ID
};

firebase.initializeApp(config);

Once this file is correctly populated, the app will authenticate to Firebase.

File Structure

The app directory contains all site files. These are copied to the dist directory to be served.

├── app
│   ├── assets
│   │   └── images
│   │       └── ...
│   ├── pages
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── scripts
│   │   ├── controllers 
│   │   │   └── ... 
│   │   ├── dependencies 
│   │   │   └── ...
│   │   ├── services
│   │   │   └── ...
│   │   ├── app.js
│   │   └── config.js
│   ├── styles
│   │   └── ...
│   └── templates
│       └── ...
├── dist
│   └── ...
├── Gruntfile.js
├── package.json
├── Procfile
├── README.md
└── server.js

Future Features

Integrate design responsiveness to improve experience on mobile devices.
Improve storage and retrieval of configuration variables using environment variables.
User authorization allows different access for different channels.
Admin users can delete member users.
Admin users can delete channels.
Revamp design with medieval imagery using Bootstrap.

Implementation

A running test-drive version of the app exists here.

jestann / chateau