chatr

A chat application using angular and socket.io

Prerequisites

• Node v8.2.0
• NPM v3.10.8
• Angular CLI v1.2.1

Both Node and NPM can be installed by downloading from the node.js website. The angular CLI can then be installed using the following command.

npm install -g @angular/cli

Installation

The repository contains two separate projects for the frontend and backend. Both of these are node projects that need their dependencies downloading separately.

1. Open a shell at the project root
2. cd chatr-server/
3. npm install
4. cd ../chatr-web
5. npm install

Usage

To run the project you will need two separate shell windows to run the frontend and backend.

First to run the backend websocket server.

1. Open a new shell at the project root
2. cd chatr-server/
3. npm start

This is a shortcut to start the server using nodemon to monitor for code changes and auto-reload.

To run the frontend angular project.

1. Open a new shell at the project root
2. cd chatr-web/
3. npm start

The angular CLI uses the command ng serve to run a build and start a webpack server that monitors for code changes. The build step is required to transpile the TypeScript into JavaScript. To avoid cross-domain issues in the browser the frontend project also acts as a proxy to the socket server. Using npm start calls ng serve but passes in the configuration to setup the proxy.

Now the project should be running it can be accessed in the browser by navigating to http://localhost:4200/.