There are many ways to build a chat application with Ionic. You could use Firebase as a realtime database, or you can use your own Node server with some Socket.io, and that’s what we gonna do today to build a realtime Ionic Chat!
In this tutorial we will craft a super simple Node.js server and implement Socket.io on the server-side to open realtime connections to the server so we can chat with other participants of a chatroom.
This is a super lightweight example as we don’t store any of the messages on the server – if you are nor in the chat room you will never get what happened. The result will look like in the image below.
Don’t be scared of Socket.io and a NestJs backend, you can easily implement your own realtime backend connection without any problems! Firebase seems often like the easy alternative, but actually we were able to build a live chat app with only a super small backend.
To make this a real Ionic chat you might want to add a database and store all the messages once you receive them and add some routes to return the history of a chatroom. Or you might want to create different chatrooms and separate conversations, but this post could be the starting point to your own chat implementation!
![@dependabot[bot]](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/29110?s=64&v=4){kind=small}