Chat Application

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Chat Application

A simple chat application that covers Django authorization, web sockets and authentication.

Demo:

0Nv91Na7fV.mp4

Features ⭐

1. CRUD users
2. Create rooms and chat in groups!
3. Good looking UI
4. Authenticated WebSockets to prevent unauthorized access

Setup 🛠

1. Clone or download the repository

git clone https://github.com/rustyxlol/Django-ChatApp.git
cd chat-app-django

2. Create and activate virtual environment

python -m venv venv

Windows: venv\Scripts\activate.bat
Linux: source venv/bin/activate

3. Install required packages

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Navigate to chat-app-django and run the server

python manage.py runserver

Note: make migrations if any error occurs

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

5. Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000 on a browser of your choice.

Procedure

Part 1 - Login and Signup Forms

1. Users model
2. Pages: Login, Signup, Home, Profile, (part of send message, more in next part)
3. CRUD operations on profile(username, profile picture...)

Part 2 - Chat application

1. Channels Library
2. Implementing basic functionality first then redoing it in async
3. TODO: Redis can come during production, channel layer is set to InMemoryChannelLayer for development.
4. Converted basic functionality to async
5. Added context processors for sidebar channels
6. Two public channels exist which anyone should be able to use, authentication in the next part.
7. Added messages model for permanent storage

Part 3(optional) - Authenticating WebSockets

1. The simplest approach is to use basic authentication provided by Channels by scoping our consumer in websocket connect function like so.
   Note: AuthMiddlewareStack is required.

user = self.scope['user']
if user.is_authenticated:
    // authenticated user connection 
else:
    // unauthenticated acces - disconnect/close

2. Another approach is to use Tokens - essentially create a token on the client side and send it over to the backend for authentication.

   • Requires custom middleware
   • Requires djangorestframework
   • Hard to work with because tokens cannot be passed to headers
   • Have to establish connection first, then send a token, might pose security risks

3. Third approach is to use sessions

The first and second approaches are covered in this application, look session-based branch for the third approach.

Resources

1. Django Tutorial - Corey Schafer
2. Django Channels - RealPython
3. Django Channels
4. Django Channels and WebSockets oversimplified - Dennis Ivy
5. Token Auth middleware ideas

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.