Yak Chat

Yak Chat is a school project to research modern technologies such as WebSockets, Service Worker and offline storages to create an efficient and easy-to-use chat application.

The frontend is implemented with React, styled-components and mobx-state-tree, and the light-weight backend is built with Koa and MongoDB. Real-time communication is dealt with socket.io on both sides, and data is persisted with localStorage and the application caching is provided by create-react-app out of the box via a Service Worker.

Current features:

• Send and receive messages in real-time
• Create multiple channels
• Invite people to channels with a QR-code
• Directly join channel by it's name
• See how many people are currently in the channel
• Automatically generate funny channel name suggestions

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Requirements

• Docker
• Node.js
• ngrok (for production demo only)

Development

First install linters:

$ npm install

Then start the app:

$ npm run up

Then open localhost:3000 in the browser.

Production demo

Build the production demo version with ngrok:

First start ngrok:

$ ./ngrok http -region eu 3000

Then change the API_URL in /client/src/config.js to be the https url that ngrok outputs.

Then build the demo:

$ npm run demo

If you have made changes after last build re-build from scratch:

$ npm run demo:clean

Handy commands

Remove current containers:

$ npm run down

Remove current containers and rebuild them:

$ npm run clean:build

Remove node_modules and install packages:

$ npm run clean:install

When you add a new npm package you need to reinstall packages inside the Docker container:

$ npm run reinstall:client
$ npm run reinstall:server

Screenshots