This is a chat app designed to learn websockets using the socket.io library. Users can either create new chat rooms or join existing ones. Existing rooms display in a dropdown menu, while users can type in a new room of their choice to create one.
Notice: Usernames are unique per room.
Once in a room, the users can chat or share their geolocation informaiton with one another in real time.
The rooms also have a linkify app running that will dynamically add link tags to urls and email addresses.
Each chatroom contains a sidebar that has the name of the chatroom and a list of the users. This information is updated dynamically as users enter and leave the room.
A demo of the chatroom app can be reached at https://neighly-chat-app.herokuapp.com
The server has built-in commands to help the users.
These commands are accessed by typing / and then the command before sending it to the server.
The currently available commands are:
/help- returns a brief description of all available commands
/time- returns the local time of the server
/weather- returns a forecast for your area. Be aware that you need to share your location with the chatroom first (this is public. TODO: make sharing location optionally private)
/dm- sends a private message to another user in the same room.
/pm- same as/dm
If you want to install your own version of the chat app locally please follow these instructions.
The following software is required to run the chat app.
gitnode
To install and run locally:
$ git clone git://github.com/neighlyd/chat-app
$ cd chat-app
$ npm install
$ npm run dev This will launch the chat app at localhost:3000/
If you wish to deploy the app remotely to heroku, I recommend viewing their (Getting Started on Heroku with Node.js tutorial)[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs].
My goal is to integrate the chat app into other apps that I have created, such as the Task App, Expensify App.
I plan to unite the three apps with a single sign-on account API, treating them each as microservices.
Ideally, users will be able to get a list of tasks and expenses from the chat app through bot-commands (e.g. "/weather" to return weather based on the location or "/tasks" to return tasks they have stored in the database)