Loose chat server

This is a small and naive implementation of a chat server. It has a REST-like API to:

• Create new session - there's no authentication, so basically just claim an available username
• List currently active (and inactive) users
• List all messages
• List all messages since some point of reference
• Post messages (requires a session token)

Test it

There's a bunch of tests ensuring the correct workings of the server. To run them:

npm install
npm test

Run it

Run the server:

npm install
PORT=6660 npm start

You can leave out the PORT environment variable if you like, it defaults to 6660, the port of the beast. There are two more environment variables you can set:

• SESSION_INACTIVE_AFTER - mark users as inactive after this many milliseconds. Defaults to 1000 - e.g. if the user has not posted a message or requested messages from the server during the last second, they will be marked as inactive.
• SESSION_GONE_AFTER - completely remove a user´s session if they have been inactive for this many milliseconds, defaults to 10000, e.g. 10 seconds.

The API

The API attempts to explain itself. You'll find it at http://localhost:6660/api (unless you changed the PORT). The server supports CORS from any domain, so you can run your client from another server and make requests to the API directly from the client.

All API endpoints have links to related resources, with some basic information about params, placeholders in the URL, using URI Templates) and body, a JSON document posted as the body of requests (remember to set the Content-Type header to application/json with POST requests).

To log in, you can either just hit the endpoint directly:

curl -X POST -i -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"user": "desiredName"}' \
    http://localhost:6660

This will return a document that includes an uuid. You'll need to remember this, as you'll pass it back to the server to post messages as the user you created the session as. The returned document also conveniently contains links to other resources (importantly: get active users, get messages, post messages) with the uuid prefilled into the URLs.