An IRC like chat system written in Node.js

Demo

Basic demo is available Here.

Why?

I had a spare Raspberry Pi and I wanted to use it! One of ideas in my head was to have your own on-premise chat server that you can use for cheap and own your data (< $50 hardware) forever and free!

Requirements

For compiling you need:

• Node 8+ (with npm5)
• libsqlite3
• OpenSSL 1.x.x (for uWebsockets)
• zlib 1.x (for uWebsockets)
• libuv 1.3+ or Boost.Asio 1.x (both optional on Linux)

You can use following commands to install them:

• Fedora: sudo dnf install openssl-devel zlib-devel
• Homebrew: brew install openssl zlib libuv
• Vcpkg: vcpkg install openssl zlib libuv and/or vcpkg install openssl:x64-windows zlib:x64-windows libuv:x64-windows

Once you have installed dependencies above just do npm install && gulp (creates a dist folder that you can upload to your machine). Project can run on almost any machine that nodejs supports. I have successfully tested it on Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi etc.

Configurations

You can use a .env file or environment variables to configure the server, here are the environment variables you can change:

• RC_URL (default http://localhost:3000/) Raspchat URL where server would start listening
• DB_PATH (default chat-log.db) Database path for SQLite database
• WS_URL (default ws://localhost:3000/chat) Websocket URL if you are running it behind some proxy
• WSS_URL (default wss://localhost:3000/chat) Websocket secure URL if you are running it behind some proxy

You can read about .env file here

Features:

• Basic GIF support
• Basic nick support
• Channel (join/leave/list-members) support
• Markdown support
• Message history on group join

Pending:

• Refactor frontend using hyperapp
• Scrollable history
• Unit tests
• Introduce admin panel with:
  • Reserved alias authorization
  • IP limiting/banning
  • Fixed alias with passwords