slackYY

Yet another slack like application. Built using Sails framework for Node.js.

You can view the demo of the app in Youtube:

Architecture

• Sails.js : Sails is a framework that is built on top of Express. The code extensively (specifically the Blueprint API) uses the features provided by Sails to achieve things.
• Socket.io : For real time chat app, we internally use socket.io. Sails.js wraps on top of this library and gives a nice API for consumption. Socket.io actually has two parts: a client side which runs in browser and a server side library for Node.js.
• PostgreSQL Server: We use Postgres as RDBMS backend for storing user, channel and the chat messages for later retrieval purpose.
• React/Redux: The frontend application is built using React and Redux. The folder client contains all the frontend related code.

How to run ?

Pre-requisites

1. Latest LTS Node.js (I recommend using nvm for installing it.)
2. Yarn
3. PostgreSQL Server

Note that postgresql server should be running up. To see if it's running on a Linux machine, you have to do:

$ systemctl status postgresql
● postgresql.service - PostgreSQL RDBMS
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Thu 2017-06-29 20:35:01 IST; 3h 36min ago
  Process: 1138 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 1138 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Tasks: 0
   Memory: 0B
      CPU: 0
   CGroup: /system.slice/postgresql.service

Jun 29 20:35:01 jane systemd[1]: Starting PostgreSQL RDBMS...
Jun 29 20:35:01 jane systemd[1]: Started PostgreSQL RDBMS.

Also you need to have a database named slacky present which should be accessible by a user named postgres with password postgres. In case you need to change any of the following, please edit this file.

Installation instructions

1. git clone git@github.com:psibi/slackYY.git

2. yarn global add sails

3. cd slackYY/client

4. yarn install

5. yarn run build

6. cd ..

7. yarn install

8. sails lift

Go and visit http://localhost:1337 to see the application!

App Organization

These are the important directories you will find:

• views

Holds the presentaion layer of the code. We use EJS for embedding templates.

• client

Contains the front-end client code which uses React and Redux.

• api

Contains the backbonse of the entire application. The server side code lies here. Models, controllers and Policies are defined here.

• tasks

Grunt tasks and their configuration

• config

Contains different files which can be used for configuring database connection, routes, policies etc.

• test

Test directory containing integration testing code for controllers and models related functions.

Appendix (Dev notes while learning)

Some goodies

Using blueprint gives automatic REST API

Note that all the requests are GET. For more methods see here

curl "http://localhost:1337/channel/create?name=hello2"

curl "http://localhost:1337/channel/create?name=channel1"

curl "http://localhost:1337/channel/find?id=2"

This also works which is more clean (Follows REST more faithfully):

curl -d '{"name":"channel3"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:1337/channel/create

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:1337/channel

Example of adding Message:

curl -d '{"msg":"dummy msg", "userName": "sibi", "channel": 1}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:1337/message/create

curl -d '{"email":"sibi@psibi.in","password":"sibi"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:1337/login