viral32111/livechat

Real-time, ephemeral, room-based chat system.

Live Chat

This is a real-time, ephemeral, room-based chat system, housed in a dynamic & modern web application.  

📥 Usage

Deployment History

• September 16th 2023: Purchased new domain & deployed the project to https://live-chat.viral32111.dev.
• September 11th 2023: Freenom suspended my https://viral32111.cf domain.
• July 25th 2023: Deployed on Oracle Cloud (including database) to https://livechat.viral32111.cf.
• June 25th 2023: Deployment suspended due to running out of free credit on Google Cloud Platform.
• January 11th 2023: Initially publicly deployed to https://livechat.viral32111.cf running on Google Cloud's Compute Engine virtual machines, although the database is hosted on MongoDB Atlas.

Alternatively you can run it locally by using the official Docker image. You will need to set all the required environment variables (see production.env).

🏗️ Development

This assumes you have a MongoDB server already up and running.

• Clone this repository (git clone https://github.com/viral32111/LiveChat.git)
• Switch to the server directory (cd ./Server)
• Install production & development dependencies (npm install)
• Setup up development.env & test.env environment variables files (copy production.env and configure appropriately).
• Run unit & integration tests (npm test).
• Start project (npm start)

✔️ Progress

See the Kanban board, issues and milestones for tracking the project's progress.

⚖️ License

Copyright (C) 2022-2023 viral32111.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses.

livechat's Issues

Setup continuous integration & deployment

Should build, test/validate, and deploy both the client-side and server-side code.

UI for room list page

Improve database structure

Guests

• Object ID
• Name (String)
• In Room (Object ID of Room)
• Joined At (Date)

Rooms

• Object ID
• Name (String)
• Is Private (Boolean)
• Join Code (String)
• Created At (Date)
• Created By (Object ID of Guest)

Messages

• Object ID
• Content (String)
• Attachments (Array of Objects)
  • MIME Type (String)
  • Path (String)
• Sent At (Date)
• Sent By (Object ID of Guest)
• Room (Object ID of Room)

WebSocket disconnection due to invalid frame header

The WebSocket often disconnects and fails to reconnect due to "Invalid frame header", leaving the user on a broken chat room page until they refresh.

Add default .env file to Docker image

Will allow specifying only some configuration values as overrides.

Server-side API routes for choose name page

Need to setup the server-side Express environment before this.

Fix code scanning alert - Type confusion through parameter tampering

Tracking issue for:

• https://github.com/viral32111/LiveChat/security/code-scanning/4

Server-side API routes & websocket for chat room page

Input validation for choose name page

Should be both in HTML inputs using attributes, in JavaScript before sending to the server, and on the server when a request is received.

Fix code scanning alert - Clear text transmission of sensitive cookie

Tracking issue for:

• https://github.com/viral32111/LiveChat/security/code-scanning/2

Add client-side browser files to Docker image

This will enable Express to serve the client-side files statically from within the Docker image.

Server-side API routes for room list page

This will complete the dynamic-ness of this page.

CTRL+C handler to allow exiting Docker image

Check if guest name already exists when choosing name

Guest names should be unique to prevent confusion.

UI for choose name page

UI for chat room page