Creating a realtime group chat app using Django-channels and Redis server
- Basic signup/login using Django's default classes
- Admin can create chat rooms
- Users can chat in their chat rooms after choosing a chat room
- Chat messages are stored in Redis during the chat and also in sqlite database.
- users.txt file contains the list of users in the chat app including their usernames and passwords.
The channel layer is a communication system that allows multiple consumer instances to talk with each other.
A channel layer offers several key abstractions:
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Channel: A mailbox for sending messages. Messages can be sent to a channel using its name. Every consumer instance has a unique channel name, generated automatically.
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Group: A collection of related channels identified by a name. Participants can add or remove channels from the group using the group's name. Messages sent to the group are broadcasted to all channels in it.
In the context of a chat application, the goal is to enable multiple instances of ChatConsumer within the same chat room to interact. This is achieved by having each ChatConsumer add its channel to a group named after the room. By doing so, messages sent to the group are received by all ChatConsumers in that room.
To implement this, a channel layer that uses Redis as its underlying storage mechanism is used. Redis provides the infrastructure to manage these channels and groups, enabling efficient message distribution among participants.
- Python 3.9
- Extra libraries
- Django-channels:
$ python -m pip install -U 'channels[daphne]'- channels_redis so that Channels knows how to interface with Redis
$ python3 -m pip install channels_redis
- Redis server is run on docker. So, docker has to installed
$ python3 -m pip install channels_redis- Run Redis server of Docker
$ docker run --rm -p 6379:6379 redis:7- Run Django-Chat app
$ python manage.py runserver