davidado/go-chat-rooms

A multi-chatroom application implemented in Go that handles websocket connections, message broker transmissions, and client and room management

Overview

A multi-chatroom application implemented in Go that handles websocket connections and the transmission of messages to different rooms over a swappable message broker.

Features

This chat application is deployable to multiple servers behind a load balancer. Each instance handles websocket connections and manages clients and rooms while broadcasting messages through a message broker like Redis, RabbitMQ, or one of your own implementation.

• Anonymous users are allowed by default but can be configured in the .env file with ALLOW_ANON="false".
• Authentication middleware is implemented with JSON web tokens. Set JWT_SECRET in .env before use.
• This application does not implement a signup or login process but can verify and parse existing JSON web tokens stored in either a cookie (set COOKIE_NAME in .env) or transmitted through the request header in the Authorization field. The only field necessary in the token is username. Refer to pkg/auth/jwt.go for more details.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.22+ since the project uses its routing features but it should be fairly straightforward to implement your own router if using earlier versions of Go.

• A running instance of Redis or RabbitMQ. If you do not already have a running instance, you can run docker run -d --name redis -p 6379:6379 redis to run a local Redis instance in Docker.

Installation

1. Download or clone the project to your workspace: git clone https://github.com/davidado/go-chat-rooms

2. Edit the Makefile and set the MAIN_PACKAGE_PATH to either ./cmd/redis or ./cmd/rabbitmq (default is ./cmd/redis).

Usage

1. Execute make run in the root path (same directory as the Makefile).

2. Go to http://localhost:8080/[room] where [room] can be anything you choose.

3. Test the room by going to the same URL in another tab or browser and type away.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.