Basic example of a multi-room chatroom, with messages from all rooms a user is in multiplexed over a single WebSocket connection.
There is no chat persistence; you only see messages sent to a room while you are in that room.
Uses the Django auth system to provide user accounts; users are only able to use the chat once logged in, and this provides their username details for the chatroom.
Some channels can be limited to only "staff" users; the example includes code that checks user credentials on incoming WebSockets to allow or deny them access to chatroom streams based on their staff status.
Make a new virtualenv for the project, and run:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Then, you'll need Redis running locally; the settings are configured to
point to localhost, port 6379, but you can change this in the
CHANNEL_LAYERS setting in settings.py.
Finally, run:
python manage.py migrate python manage.py runserver
Run the app:
docker-compose up -d
The app will now be running on: {your-docker-ip}:8000
Note: You will need to prefix python manage.py commands with: docker-compose run --rm web. e.g.: docker-compose run --rm web python manage.py createsuperuser
Finally, run:
docker-compose run --rm web python manage.py migrate
Make yourself a superuser account:
python manage.py createsuperuser
Then, log into http://localhost:8000/admin/ and make a couple of Room objects. Be sure to make one that is set to "staff-only",
Finally, make a second user account in the admin that doesn't have staff privileges. You'll use this to log into the chat in a second window, and to test the authentication on that staff-only room.
Now, open a second window in another browser or in "incognito" mode - you'll be logging in to the same site with two user accounts. Navigate to http://localhost:8000 in both browsers and open the same chatroom.
Now, you can type messages and see them appear on both screens at once. You can join other rooms and try there, and see how you receive messages from all rooms you've currently joined.
If you try and make the non-staff user join your staff-only chatroom, you should see an error as the server-side authentication code kicks in.
If you want to try out making some changes and getting a feel for Channels, here's some ideas and hints on how to do them:
- Add message persistence. There's already a message sent to make a user join a room, so you can use that to send some previous messages; you'll need to make a model to save messages in, though, and write to it in the Room.send_message function.
- Make the Room list dynamically change as rooms are added and removed. You can do this in a similar way to the Liveblog example by adding hooks to model save and delete and sending events over the channel when this happens.
- Add message editing and deletion. You'll need to have made them persistent first; make sure you send message IDs down with every message so the client can keep track of them. Then, write some code to handle editing and trigger sending new messages down when this happens with the message ID it's happening to. The Liveblog example has live editing already; that might help.
You can find the Channels documentation at http://channels.readthedocs.org