vijethph / SocketChat

A Web Chat Application based on Express and SocketIO Frameworks.

Socket Chat

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A SocketIO based online chat application which can be deployed and run via Docker and Localtunnel
Made with TypeScript, ExpressJS, ioredis and Bootstrap

📋 Table of Contents

• Screenshots
• About
• Getting Started
• Deployment
• Usage
• Built Using
• Authors
• Acknowledgments

📸 Screenshots

Login Page	New User Entry	Chat Screen
Login Page	Notification to existing users on new user join	Chat Screen in a room

Sending Location	Location Details
Location Details sent as a modal link	Location Map displayed in a modal

ℹ️ About

This is a chat application that can be used to connect online with friends by hosting one server at any particular point. It uses Express and SocketIO frameworks to establish and maintain the connection, and Redis to broadcast events to a subset of clients (users in a room).

Users can pick a room and join the chat and send messages which can be read by others. They can also send their location co-ordinates to others, which is displayed in a map under a modal.

⚙️ Getting Started

Follow these instructions in order to get a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on as a live server.

💾 Prerequisites

node.js>=16 and npm>=7 are required.

After installing, check their versions using these commands

node -v
npm -v

💻 Installing

Clone this project and open this project in terminal.

Install Dependencies.

npm install

Pull Redis image from DockerHub and run it in background.

docker pull redis:6.2
docker run --name redis-cache -p 6379:6379 -d redis:6.2

Create a .env file in the project folder and add the following entry:

REDIS_URL="redis://localhost:6379"

Finally, run the project using following command and check the output at http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

npm start

The following output will be shown in the terminal after running above command.

listening on PORT:3000

Another way to install this app is to use Docker Compose. Run this command to start the app:

docker-compose up

This will run the app at http://localhost:3000, which can be seen in your browser.

🌐 Usage

This application can be used by others if it is deployed using the steps in deployment. For usage by a single user, the above installation steps are sufficient.

🚀 Deployment

After starting the server, open another terminal, connect to the internet and type the following

npm install -g localtunnel
lt --port 3000

Now the project is deployed. It will show an output giving a website address like this:

deployed at [e-mail]

Ask your friends to open up the specified url and start chatting.

⛏️ Built Using

• Express - Server Framework
• SocketIO - Connection Framework
• NodeJS - Server Environment
• TypeScript - Programming Language
• Redis - Messaging Cache
• Docker - Build Framework

✍️ Authors

• @vijethph - Idea & Development

🎉 Acknowledgements

• Thanks to CPMA Session conducted by ATS Learning Solutions
• Inspiration: Project Ideas for Javascript
• References: All Youtube Channels for using SocketIO.
• Brad Traversy