Simple Chat

A simple peer-to-peer chat app by Sienna M. Wood.

Getting Started

Requirements:

node 10.24.0 or later (includes npm)

  # install yarn globally
  npm install -g yarn

Install and run:

# clone repository
git clone https://github.com/siennamw/simple-chat.git
cd simple-chat

# install dependencies
yarn

# start development server
yarn start

Open http://localhost:3000 in a browser to view the running app. A peer-to-peer session will be created automatically for this user, making it ready for additional users to join.
Click the link to join the chat and a second tab will open. The two will be automatically connected in a peer-to-peer session. Additional users can join the session in the same way.
Switch between the tabs to send chat messages between them.

Test

To run all tests once:

yarn test --watchAll=false

Notes

PeerJS, the library being used to establish peer-to-peer connections, uses WebRTC. Support for WebRTC is improving rapidly, but still has some limitations.
To broker peer-to-peer connections, PeerJS provides a free cloud-hosted PeerServer, which this project uses. In a production environment, it might be preferable to run our own PeerServer to have more control and transparency over this process.
Currently there are no hard limits on the number of peers that can connect to each other. There are certainly practical limits, however, and I would expect more and more bugs and performance issues as the number of peers increases.
Using peer-to-peer connections means that there is no way to capture or monitor chat content. This may not be desirable, depending on business needs.
Currently there are no tests for peer.service.js, which is a critical component of the app. This is because the test setup bundled in create-react-app is geared towards testing React components and user interactions with the UI, so it will take some time to sort out leveraging this system to test the peer-to-peer service.