zodsoft / grillode

A web-based chat application written in CoffeeScript for Node.js

Overview

Grillode is A web-based chat application written in CoffeeScript for Node.js. It is BSD licensed.

Due to web sockets and Node's evented model, the Grillode server should be able to handle thousands of real-time users simultaneously.

A demo can be found at http://chat.jupo.org.

Installation

Grillode is available in source form on both Github and Bitbucket. Grillode also makes use of the following libraries which can be installed using Node Package Manager (NPM).

• express >= 1.0.3
• socket.io >= 0.6.8
• coffee-script >= 1.0.0
• coffeekup >= 0.2.2
• htmlparser >= 1.7.3
• node-markdown >= 0.1.0

With Node.js and NPM installed, you can install all of the above dependencies by running the following command from within the Grillode directory:

$ npm install .

You can then run the Grillode server by running the following command from within the Grillode directory, with an optional port number:

$ coffee server.coffee 8000

To allow the server to continue to run detached from the terminal session, you can run the same command using nohup:

$ nohup coffee server.coffee 8000 &

When running the server detached from the terminal session, you can shut the server down in one command with::

$ kill -9 `ps aux | grep server.coffee | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

Configuration

Grillode can operate in several modes to support different use cases:

• A general chat server with a fixed set of rooms
• A hybrid of the above, where users can add their own rooms
• A customer support service, where customers join a chat queue and support staff answers each customer chat one by one
• A hybrid of the above, where users are randomly matched to each other
• All of the above at once!

Several settings found in the file settings.coffee can be used to control the modes described above, these are:

• ROOMS - The initial list of fixed room names
• ADDABLE_ROOMS - When set to on, rooms can be added, allowing for the applicable modes described above
• ADDABLE_ROOMS_VISIBLE - When set to on, dynamically added rooms are visible in the room list
• DEFAULT_URL - URL redirected to from the index page, which can be one of the URLs listed below

The following URLs are provided which cater for the various modes described:

• /rooms - List all rooms
• /rooms/add - Add a room
• /wait - Wait for someone
• /waiting - View the waiting queue
• /match - Join someone waiting
• /random - Random match up
• /about - Renders this README file