chatter

README

Chatter

Chatter is a real-time group messaging application designed to be deployed with remarkable simplicity, requiring only a single binary file and a database file. The project serves as an exploration of Go's powerful features, particularly focusing on concurrency and design patterns while gaining hands-on experience in building real-time systems.

Architecture

Chatter employs a modern, event-driven architecture that bridges real-time and traditional web communication technologies. The application is constructed using a React frontend and a Go backend, strategically utilizing REST API and WebSocket protocols to deliver a seamless messaging experience.

The REST API handles non-real-time operations such as authentication, user profile management, and message history retrieval. In contrast, WebSockets power the real-time communication layer, enabling instant message transmission, user status updates, and interactive features like typing indicators.

At the core of the system is an event-driven WebSocket implementation where bidirectional event propagation occurs between client and server endpoints. Each client-originated event (e.g., message transmission, typing indicators) is emitted to the server, with corresponding server-to-client event propagation. The system implements dedicated event handlers registered to specific event types, enabling modular processing of discrete communication events. This architectural pattern facilitates extensible application logic through the simple definition of new events and their corresponding handlers, allowing complex interaction scenarios to be managed efficiently through targeted event processing chains.

Features

The application offers a comprehensive set of real-time communication capabilities including real-time messaging, typing indicators, read and sent notifications, and user online status tracking.

Configuration

To begin using Chatter, start by configuring your environment. Copy the config.example.yml file to config.yml and update the values as needed. The configuration options are detailed in app/config.go, with the default configuration providing a functional out-of-the-box experience, though it's not recommended for production use.

Next, copy the example.env file to .env to configure the client settings.

Development

For local development, run:

make dev

This command launches the Go server with hot reload and starts a VITE development server for the client.

Deployment

To build the entire application into a single binary file:

make build

This generates a binary file containing both server and client components at bin/chatter. Run it simply with:

./bin/chatter

Docker Deployment

Build the Docker image:

make docker-build

Run the Docker container:

docker run -p 8080:8080 chatter

Licensing

The project is licensed under the MIT License. Detailed information can be found in the LICENSE file.