Realtime-Chat (RTC)

This web application is written in Go, allows users to login to the server using Github accounts and chat with others.

Design choices:

This rtc server initially supports 1000 active users. We choose a monolith architecture which includes an OAuth2 authentication service, a chat service that uses go channels for message queues. All user data are persisted in a PostgreSQL server and messages are persisted in a Cassandra server. Requested data are cached in a Redis server.

This project is in early stage and expects abrupted changes during development.

Features:

• Authentication service.
• Chat service.
• Last seen service.
• Cache service.

How to run on local machine?

You can run rtc on localhost with TLS enabled and HTTPS scheme. Use package mkcert to install a CA to the local machine's trust system and generate localhost.pem and localhost-key.pem files for the localhost. Then, store these files in tls/ folder. For convinience, you can comment out these settings in .env.dev file which disables TLS and allows the rtc to run with HTTP scheme.

# TLS Certificate.
TLS_CERT=localhost.pem
TLS_PRIVKEY=localhost-key.pem

Follow this link by Github to register your rtc to Github OAuth2 service and add provided CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET in .env.dev file.

# Github OAuth2.
CLIENT_ID=00000000000000000000
CLIENT_SECRET=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Run the whole cluster where each component runs in an isolated Docker container.

# Run containers
docker compose up --build --env-file .env.dev -d
# Drop containers and associated docker resources
docker compose down -v

Access to your local server at https://localhost:8080 and enjoy.

How to host on local machine?

We can either use Port Forwarding or a tunnel service such as CloudFlare's. With Port Forwarding, set the port fowarding rule in your router to forward incoming traffic from router's port 443/80 for https/http to {your-local-ip-address}:8080.