1socialChat

A fullstack social media platform with real-time chatroom functionality.

Features

• User authentication (username/password)
• Customizable user profiles (bio, profile picture, links)
• Post text, images, and videos (up to 10MB)
• Edit and delete posts
• Real-time global chatroom
• User-created chatrooms
• Post reactions
• Clickable usernames linking to profiles

Tech Stack

• Backend: Node.js, Express, Socket.io
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3
• Auth: bcrypt password hashing, express-session

Setup

1. Install dependencies:

npm install

2. Create a .env file based on .env.example and configure your database connection.

3. Set up PostgreSQL database:

psql -U postgres
CREATE DATABASE socialchat;

4. Run the database schema (see server/schema.sql)

5. Start the server:

npm start
# or for development with auto-reload
npm run dev

6. Open http://localhost:3000

Deployment

Ready for Railway deployment with PostgreSQL plugin.