Welcome to My Skype

Authors:

Task

Create a Skype like server and client.

The project will have the following features:

Registration
Login
Contacts (Add/Remove/Search)
Video calling
Audio calling

Description

The Skype application is divided between two building blocks - Client and server.

The client runs on the user machine. Data connections such as audio, video and chat are peer to peer; clients connect directly to each other with the support of a server that provides information about other clients in the Skype network. The client has a graphic user interface as well as a backend that responsible for communicating with the server, establishing data connections and data processing.

More details on the client here.

The server runs on a remote computer and is responsible for authenticating users, retrieving a users contacts list, either if they are online or not and their public IP address on the web. The server is necessary because there is not way for a client to know other clients public IP address when most IP addresses on the web are dynamic and may change from time to time.

More on on the server here. More on on the setting up Postgres.

Firewall

Clients within the same local network connect directly via LAN. If your computer is running a firewall such as ufw, that will block local traffic by default and the peer-to-peer connection will not work. You must allow IPs in your local network. For exemple, if you router IP is 192.168.178.0 then

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.178.0/24

Installation

check below and in src/client/README.md

Usage

The build is done using CMake and to facilitate this process we use the script ./build.sh. This script will produce and run 3 binaries - ./build/bin/server, ./build/bin/client and ./build/bin/test_client.

test_client is used to test the communication with a deployed server. More in the server readme.

To generate the build files please run

        ./build.sh --gen

To build all above mentioned binaries

        ./build.sh --make

To build and run specific binaries

        ./build.sh --run client
        ./build.sh --run server
        ./build.sh --run test_client

Unit tests will run with the --test option

        ./build.sh --test server

Cleaning. clean-all will remove all build files requiring ./build.sh --gen.

       ./build.sh --clean
       ./build.sh --clean-bin
       ./build.sh --clean-all

Shared code

The code in src/shared and include/shared is shared between the client and server.

Deps

This application depends on the following packages

qt6
sdl2
libpqxx (Postgres client)
ffmpeg

khalilmasri/Skype