Poker Pocket Backend

Nitramite Poker Pocket back end server was developed to run Texas Hold'em games. It's powering Nitramite Poker Pocket game. This back end is pretty lightweight and can run thousands of rooms easily.

Background

Original reason I shared this code here was that I wanted to find someone who wants to create Virtual Reality front end with Unity or any other game development platform. Time has passed so much that I gave up and will no longer develop this further. I also changed license to MIT allowing anyone build anything top of this, but don't expect help from me since I have moved to other things long time ago. I may however sometimes check this repository out to update dependencies.

Testing it out

Here's list of different front end clients. You may want to take a look at them to see what it's all about.

Sample Web UI: https://pokerpocket.nitramite.com/
- Sample Web UI source code: https://github.com/norkator/Poker-Pocket-Web-Client
Android client: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nitramite.pokerpocket
- Android client source code: https://github.com/norkator/poker-pocket-android
Web UI React version: https://github.com/linus2code/poker-pocket-react-client (created by linus2code)

Prerequisites

Download handRanks.dat file from: https://github.com/christophschmalhofer/poker/blob/master/XPokerEval/XPokerEval.TwoPlusTwo/HandRanks.dat
and place it under /src/app folder.
Get database platform PostgreSQL https://www.postgresql.org/
- You can also change database to something else, see:
  - https://github.com/norkator/poker-pocket-backend/blob/master/src/database/sequelize.js#L16
  - https://sequelize.org/docs/v6/other-topics/dialect-specific-things/

Basic setup

config.js has some configurations you may want to change.
create .env file with following contents and provide database connection properties.

DB_DIALECT=postgres
DB_USER=database_user
DB_HOST=database_host
DB_DATABASE=PokerPocket
DB_PASSWORD=database_password
DB_PORT=5432
SERVER_CMD_PASSWORD=anypasswd

Run npm install
Run npm run dev on development environment (uses nodemon)
Backend is now running.
Open https://pokerpocket.nitramite.com/ and use connection switch set as dev to open connection to localhost web socket.

Optional: If you need created user to play automatically, go to browser console and type:

Backend & front end communication

To create front end, it's essential to know how communication works. Data transmission itself is build on top of web sockets and every message moves with specific key name.

I try explain steps in simple way:

New connection comes from front end.
Web socket is created and connectionId is generated which is basically integer with auto increment. Also webSocket library generates socketKey which is also returned and used for verification of requests from front end.
After step 2. front end asks rooms via getRooms or getSpectateRooms key which is then answered by same key name but result having array of rooms.
Front end renders rooms or spectating rooms and then click is handled by sending selectRoom or selectSpectateRoom key to back end.
User is then appended to selected room and back end will send room parameters with key roomParams to render view according to state of room.
All the other actions like calling, raising, folding, getting stats, login, creating account is only a matter of key and parameters needed to call that specific action. I fill more details later but everything is visible at code how to do it.

Note

.gitignore is ignoring HandRanks.dat which is huge file

Database

Before this project used MySQL NodeJS package but it's now changed to Sequelize to support multiple database platforms. See https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize for different connectors. This back end come by default with pg and pg-hstore for Postgres.