Dissonance

A real-time chat app modeled on Discord, built in April 2021 with Node.js, Socket.IO, MongoDB and Handlebars. It is no longer maintained, and the hosted demo that used to run at dissonance.page is offline.

What works

• Creating servers
• Inviting users to a server by link
• Real-time messaging over WebSockets
• Two channels per server

Never built

These were planned when development stopped:

• Create Channels
• Direct Messaging System
• Role System
• Configurable Servers
• Modify your information (as a user)
• Leave Servers
• Delete Servers

Setup

How to install the project dependencies

1. Create and configure a MongoDB instance which you can read/write to
2. In your Terminal or Command Prompt, run the following at the root of the project directory:

$ npm i --save

How to configure the environment variables

Create a .env file at the root of the project. The server reads these variables: MONGO_URL, PORT, ENV, SESSION_SECRET, TIMEZONE, HTTP_ONLY, CERT_FULL_CHAIN_PATH and CERT_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH.

If you set ENV to prod, you will need to set up a https certificate via CERT_FULL_CHAIN_PATH and CERT_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH

If you set ENV to something other than prod (i.e. dev), you will need to set CERT_FULL_CHAIN_PATH and CERT_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH to a random string (so the environment variable is defined)

How to run the project using NodeJS

In your Terminal or Command Prompt, run the following at the root of the project directory to run the server, which will expose an API and the client:

$ npm start

How to build the project using Docker

1. Change the port which the server will run on, by default it is port 3000
2. In your Terminal or Command Prompt, run the following at the root of the directory to build the server and tag it dissonance:

$ docker build --tag  dissonance .

How to run the project using Docker

In your Terminal or Command Prompt, run the following to run the server, which will expose the service on port 3000 if you have a .env file:

$ docker run -t -p 3000:3000 --env-file ./.env dissonance

Or run the following in Terminal/Command Prompt to define custom environment variable(s)

$ docker run -p 3000:3000 -e PORT=3000 -e ENV=dev ... dissonance

How to clean up the source code

In your Terminal or Command Prompt, run the following at the root of the project directory:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/eslint . --fix