Accord - Chat for Gamers Honda Fans

A simple chatroom application, created in about 24 hours with Elm, WebSockets, and Python 3.

Deployed here: https://chat.ovvens.com

Dependencies

To compile this project, you need Elm (0.19) and Python (>=3.7). You can find instructions for installing Elm here. Additional Elm dependencies will be installed automatically (see elm.json).

The Python server code requires the websockets package, you can install with pip:

pip3 install websockets

Optional Dependencies

make release requires curl (refer to your package manager), uglifyjs, and html-minifier. The latter to programs can be installed via npm:

npm install -g uglify-js html-minifier

make release simply minifies the HTML, CSS, and JS. This step is not required.

Getting Started

After installing the dependencies above, you can compile the Elm module simply by calling make. This will produce web/chat.js.

Next, serve the files in web using a server of your choice. For simple testing, you can use python3's http.server:

python3 -m http.server --directory web 8000

In Firefox or Chrome, navigate http://localhost:8000, and you should see an error screen (since no websocket server is running).

To run the websocket server, simply run

python3 server.py

Now, navigate to http://localhost:8000 again, and you should see a prompt ("What should we call you?").

Disclaimer

This program is largely just a proof-of-concept. If you want to use it seriously, I strongly advise serving your HTML over with a more robust server using HTTPS. When you switch to HTTPS, most browsers will no longer permit insecure WebSocket connection ("ws://hostname"), so you will have to switch to a secure connection ("wss://hostname") in web/index.html.

server.py does not include any built-in SSL support, you you can either add this yourself or use a reverse proxy.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License. See LICENSE for details.