Chatterbox is a small multi-room chat website built with Ruby on Rails and Faye (using the PrivatePub gem by Ryan Bates).
Chatterbox has three major parts:
- The Rails application
- The Faye server
- The MongoDB chat log
The Rails app is a standard Rails 3 application. Once you've set up your config/database.yml file, a bundle install, rake db:schema:laod, and rails server and you should be up and running.
Faye handles pub/sub for the app, along with the PrivatePub extension. faye.ru is already set up to create a server for you; start it with
rackup faye.ru -s thin -E production
Note: Faye currently requires thin, and its environment must be set to production (this is the RACK_ENV variable internally, not the RAILS_ENV).
You can configure Faye/PrivatePub using config/private_pub.yml. There is a sample for you to work off at config/private_pub.yml.example. Be sure to choose a good secret token!
If config/private_pub.yml does not exist, faye.ru will use the values in ENV["PP_SERVER"] and ENV["PP_TOKEN"] for the server and token to use, respectively.
Chats and events are collected into a MongoDB collection. The app uses the values in the following environment variables to connect to a MongoDB database:
ENV["MONGO_HOST"] = "mongo.db.host"
ENV["MONGO_PORT"] = "12345"
ENV["MONGO_DB"] = "database_name"
Additionally, if your connection requies a username and password, you may set these environment variables as well:
ENV["MONGO_USER"] = "mongo_user"
ENV["MONGO_PASS"] = "mongo_password"
You need to create a collection called chatlogs in your database (using a capped collection works great for Chatterbox's purposes).
Expect some improvements as time permits. Specifically:
- A list of users currently in a room, along with active/idle status
- Rooms get deleted after they are empty for a certain amount of time
- Able to change room settings after creation
- Third-party auth that doesn't crash MRI
- Maybe even an API!?