osgioia / chat-server-challenge

Node.js Chat Server

Overview

This project is a chat server built using Node.js, providing RESTful endpoints for user authentication, sending and receiving messages with Websockets and storing messages in a database.

Table of Contents

• Node.js Chat Server
  • Overview
  • Table of Contents
  • Features
  • TODO
  • 🛠️ Prerequisites
  • 🚀 Deployment
  • 🔒 Environment Configuration
  • ✅ Testing
  • 📝 Open API
  • License

Features

• User authentication with basic username/password login
• Single chat room creation on server startup
• Persistent storage of chat messages
• Unit testing
• WebSocket support for real-time chat previously with RESTful endpoints for sending and retrieval messages
• CI/CD to deploy with Github Actions
• Server scalability with Clustering

TODO

• Message deletion by clients

🛠️ Prerequisites

Non Docker

• Please make sure to either have MongoDB Community installed locally or a subscription to Mongo on the cloud by configuration a cluster in atlas.

Docker 🐳

• Please make sure to have docker desktop setup on any preferred operating system to quickly compose the required dependencies. Then follow the docker procedure outlined below.

Note: Docker Desktop comes free on both Mac and Windows, but it only works with Windows 10 Pro. A workaround is to get Docker Toolbox which will bypass the Windows 10 Pro prerequisite by executing in a VM.

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🚀 Deployment

Manual Deployment without Docker

• Create a .env file using the cp .env.example .env command and replace the existing env variables with personal settings (MongoDB URL either srv or localhost)

• Download dependencies using npm i or yarn

• Start the app in pre-production mode using npm run start or npm run start:dev for development (the app will be exposed on the port 9000; not to conflict with React, Angular, or Vue)

Deploying with Docker 🐳

• Execute the following command in-app directory:

# creates and loads the docker container with required configuration
$ docker-compose up -d 

• The following command will set up and run the docker project for quick use. Then the web application, and MongoDB will be exposed to http://localhost:9000 and http://localhost:27017 respectively.

🔒 Environment Configuration

By default, the application comes with a config module that can read in every environment variable from the .env file.

APP_ENV - the application environment to execute as, either in development or production. Determines the type of logging options to utilize. Options: dev or prod.

APP_URL - the base URL for the application. Made mainly to showcase the power of ConfigService and can be removed as it doesn't serve any other purpose

WEBTOKEN_SECRET_KEY - the secret key to encrypt/decrypt web tokens with. Make sure to generate a random alphanumeric string for this.

WEBTOKEN_EXPIRATION_TIME - the time in seconds indicating when the web token will expire; by default, it's 2400 seconds which is 40 mins.

DB_URL - the URL to the MongoDB collection

PORT - Application PORT

WEBSOCKET_PORT - Port for listening messages with WebSocket

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✅ Testing

Docker 🐳

# unit tests
$ docker exec -it nest yarn test

# e2e tests
$ docker exec -it nest yarn test:e2e

Non-Docker

# unit tests
$ npm run test

# e2e tests
$ npm run test:e2e

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📝 Open API

Out of the box, the web app comes with Swagger; an open api specification, that is used to describe RESTful APIs. Nest provides a dedicated module to work with it.

The Swagger URL is http://localhost:9000/api/docs but also follows the example of Chat Challenge.postman_collection.json in the root directory.

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License

Nest is MIT licensed.

Author