Nodejs Chat Tutorial

Goal

Create a minimal barebone chat app in heroku. This is the tutorial.

Requirements

• Node (>= 20)
• NPM

Installation

$ npm install
$ npm start

Running locally

$ npm start

# then open localhost:3000

Deploying to heroku

$ git push heroku main

Features

• Chat histories are now cached, we can store up to 20 messages.
• Displaying logs when users are connected and typing.
• Prompting user for proper username.

Roadmap (aka nice-to-have things)

• Client recognition on the server side.
• Should we cache the logs too?
• Use proper frontend framework (e.g. React, Vue, Angular, or whatever is hip) so that we don't have to worry about implementing UX stuff (like changing data or state).
• After establishing proper frontend framework, we can do nice stuff like markdown, github integration, list of online users.