dhedegaard / webchat

A simple long-polling based solution to chat in a browser, implemented in django using React for the frontend.

Webchat

A simple Django app for doing webchat over HTTP, the frontend is implemented in React using Typescript, and uses the fetch API for long polling.

For running the Django part of the project

Make sure you've got a recent python (3.4+, 2.7 not supported by Django 2.0+) installed, with pip and virtualenv

Usually for developing, I do something like:

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
(venv) $ python manage.py runserver

For production usage you'll wanna look into using uwsgi, gunicorn or a similar WSGI-based application server.

For building and developing the typescript web app

Make sure you have a recent version of NodeJS installed, with npm and/or yarn.

For setting up the environment and installing the needed packages with yarn, feel free to substitue with npm:

$ cd webapp
$ yarn

For development there's a watch script, call it like:

$ yarn watch

For building a minified production bundle:

$ yarn start

The frontend uses a few polyfills for supporting IE10+, these include babel-polyfill for Promise and whatwg-fetch for fetch.