sonhanguyen / chat

Under construction

Project: Messenger

https://www.veed.io/view/355cd794-58a4-4f67-80e9-70fdd2edd844?panel=share

The build includes the following:

• responsive - it must have web and mobile versions.
• Authentication: handrolled a JWT based flow, missing are refresh token and token invalidation/blacklisting, I'm sure there is more as auth is complicated
• A list of all the users in the system
• A list of "active" conversations
• Conversations with messages from today OR newer than 1 hour
• A "conversation" view between you and another individual in the system
• The conversation should auto-update. Method for auto-updating is up to you.

Extras Items:

• "Liveness" - the system should be able to tell if the user is active (based on the liveliness of the socket.io connection)
• Infinite Scroll of Messages in a Conversation
• I only had time for API e2e tests (./cmd --local e2e). However, inversion of control is followed in both front and back end (those index.ts are composition roots), so it should be easy to unit test.

Run

docker-compose up

Check the seeds directory for the credentials to use. As this reuses the same token across tabs you'll have to login as different users on incognito or another browser to test.

Develop locally

Requirements

• nodejs
• don't need postgres if you use the docker-compose service, to connect to postgres running on localhost do ./cmd --local run.

For more commands, run ./cmd, check out the 2 config.ts for list of env variables

Technical details

Not a lot, this is a boring CRUD app, it uses socket.io as an abstraction for server push messages (the equivalent of Rails's Action Cable). Since sockets are simplex (server to client, client to server is all REST), I didn't bother to configure socket.io to use web socket transport, so it's actually long polling with automatic reconnect.

Sockets are also authenticated with JWT.

The data model is greatly simplified, only User and Message. I haven't gotten to do the group chats so haven't had need for something like Conversation. User is both credential and user profile which is not how a more sophisticated system would do it.