Chatroom ❓❕

Introduction 📝

This project has been developed for learning purposes.
Simplistic real-time chat application.
React front-end + Node server integrating socket.io.

Project details 🔍

Stack 🔧

Backend

• NodeJS v16.14.0
• Express v4.17.3
• socket.io v4.4.1
• body-parser v1.19.2

Frontend

• Bootstrapped with create-react-app v5.0.0
• React v17.0.2
• React DOM v17.0.2
• React Redux v7.2.6
• axios v 0.26.0
• Sass v1.49.8
• React-feather v2.0.9
• classnames v2.3.1

Features

The server accepts three hard-coded users (click here to access the credentials). Once the user is logged in, the message input appears. You can log in as two different users in different browser tabs and have them exchanging messages instantaneously.

Learning goals

• installing Socket.io in a NodeJS project
• developing a frontend using React + Redux
• setting up authentication and conditional views based on authenticated state
• using websockets with socket.io
• using a Redux middleware to connect to websockets, send and receive messages

Install 👷

Clone the repository locally.

git clone <repo_url>

Access the client folder and install the dependencies.

cd client/ && npm i

Once the operation is completed, access the root and install the npm packages.

cd ../ && npm i

Running the app 🚀

This is a monorepo containg both the frontend project (client folder) and the backend project (server folder).

To launch the backend server:

cd server && npm run dev

To launch the webpack server, open a different terminal and run the following command (make sure you are at the root of the project):

cd client && npm start 

Open http://localhost:3000 to view the app in your browser.