A Real-Time Chat App with MERN and SocketIO

Chilly talk 🤗

Chat app / room

Realtime chat app for chilly talking, made for learning basics of full-stack 📖

About The Project

I have decided to improve my coding skills to strengthen my fundamentals of front-end, react and styling also with exploring new trails and oh me it was great and horrible idea at same time. So I have decided to get into back-end development.. at least to understand basics. Finally I have decided to build real time chat application which will work like for example Messenger or Telegram.

This idea allowed me to obtain a huge amount of new knowledge and to spend many hours inside of docs.

Project allows the end User to register account, login, send messages, edit them and delete. Additionally allows user to style chat window uniquely for every logged in user.

🧰 Technologies

(back to top)

🏃 Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running follow these simple steps.

✋ Prerequisites

Necessary tools

Please at first follow these steps to install necessary tools. If you have already installed npm, Node and created free MongoDB account with initializing and configuring MongoDB database skip this step and jump to Installation.

Install latest stable version of node from Official Site . It should also install the latest version of npm package manager.
Verify versionos of installed Node and package manager.
```
node -v
npm -v
```
Example output:
```
v18.12.1
9.1.2
```
If npm isn’t installed, try to install it manually using the following command inside terminal:
```
npm install -g npm
```
Create free MongoDB account here.

Initialize database and save connection URI string for later, for example:

mongodb://myDBReader:D1fficultP%40ssw0rd@mongodb0.example.com:27017/?authSource=admin
(it's just an example of connection string)

Configure access and network connection restrictions to database.

🧙‍♂️ Installation

Step by step

Server:

Clone repository.

git clone https://github.com/Arrugonoto/chat_app.git

Inside of project main directory navigate to server folder.
```
cd server/
```
Inside of a server directory create .env file

Configure .env file with necessary data:

NODE_ENV=production // node development environment, currently set as production
PORT=5000 // port on which server will be running
MONGO_URI=mongodb://myDBReader:D1fficultP%40ssw0rd@mongodb0.example.com:27017/?authSource=admin  // example connection URI string
SECRET=secret_key_example

⚠️ Remember! Never upload .env file to repository because it contains important configuration data and exposes them to be exploited.