/angular2-socketio-chat-example

An example Angular 2 chat app, made on top of ExpressJS & Socket.io.

Primary LanguageTypeScriptGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

angular2-socketio-chat-example

An example chat application made with Angular 2 and Socket.io (and NodeJS, ExpressJS and MongoDB).

Highlights

  • Angular 2.0.0 final support (with NgModule -type of modules)
  • Webpack 2 & TypeScript 2
  • Styles with SCSS
  • Webpack livereloading (on local development, not HMR but almost as good)
  • Full stack compilation on Heroku build process (this is really must to have, should also work on other systems)

Note! This angular2-socketio-chat-example should be considered currently as proof-of-concept, as currently there's couple of hotfix packages used over the real ones, however, the changes have been already committed to upstream. Also Webpack 2 is currently on beta phase, as well as TypeScript 2 has a lot of pending issues still with types.

Prequisities

The projects needs that you have the following things installed:

All of the prequisities are available on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X systems with their own installers (just go to links above and download package).

Installing prequisities on Mac OS X

You might wish to install the prequisities with Homebrew, so here're quick guide to do that.

Install Homebrew

You can install Homebrew with this command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

NodeJS

You can install NodeJS simply by giving command:

brew install node

Node Version Manager (recommended)

If you wish to run multiple NodeJS versions (to avoid problems with old NodeJS modules, you might want to use 4.2 as default, and NodeJS 6 on newer projects, you should install NVM (Node Version Manager) for managing multiple NodeJS versions.

NVM can be installed by the following command:

brew install nvm

Note! Follow the instructions after installing NVM, so that you'll get the shell extended (basically adding stuff to your .bash_profile).

Then you can just install and use specific NodeJS version like:

nvm install v6.3.1
nvm use v6.3.1

MongoDB

brew install mongodb
ln -sf /usr/local/opt/mongodb/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist

Note! You can also unload with launchctl, as well as add the load/unload commands to your .bash_profile or equivalent as aliases.

Installing prequisities on Windows

You should install installer packages of NodeJS, MongoDB and Heroku Toolbelt, either 32bit or 64bit depending on your system.

Install some Node modules globally

Windows doesn't add everything to global path, so you might want to install some packages globally (npm install -g <package>):

npm install -g gulpjs/gulp-cli#4.0
npm install -g webpack

MongoDB

When MongoDB is installed, you should create (or ensure) that you have C:\Data -directory created:

dir C:\Data

After ensuring or creating the directory, you can just launch MongoDB from command line:

mongod.exe

Other notes

On Windows installations, it will ease the task if you use PowerShell and add all the necessary paths to utilities to Windows environment path. To do so, you can right-click the Start -button, select Advanced System Settings and finally select Environment Variables. You need to restart the PowerShell (or possibly logout and login) to get the environment variables going.

Installation

Install node modules and type definitions

npm install

Note! Type definitions were earlier installed with typings, however, due switching to TypeScript 2.0 the type definitions are managed with npm and more specifically @types/*** name space.

Local development

Build

npm run build

Start web server

npm start

Gulp (optional)

The gulp tasks for this project require gulp v4-alpha. If you don't wish to globally install the v4 gulp-cli, you can run the gulp tasks using the locally installed gulp under ./node_modules/.bin — for example:

./node_modules/.bin/gulp

If you wish, you can also install Gulp globally:

npm install -g gulpjs/gulp-cli#4.0

After that you can just run:

gulp

Open local app in browser

http://localhost:5000/

Configuration

  • MONGODB_URI=mongodb://user:pass@hostname:port/database MongoDB URI (you can leave empty if you use MongoDB on localhost)

For local development, you can save the environment to .env -file on project root:

MONGODB_URI=mongodb://user:pass@hostname:port/database

Heroku

Create a Heroku app first (if you don't have already one)

heroku create --region eu mycoolapp

Add MongoDB

You can use a free plan of MongoLab for data storage:

heroku addons:create mongolab:sandbox

Deploy

git push heroku master

Open Heroku app in browser

heroku open