WS an open source peer to peer chat library

This is still a WIP, expect lots of breaking changes as we are live-experimenting with the API. WS uses gorilla's websocket lib to facilitate a simple chat client library that can be used to support:

realtime peer to peer messaging with ID's (currently, we assume a mobile number, or username as an ID)
backup for chat messages so that messages will be available even if one client is disconnected

Roadmap

Implement peer to peer chatting
Add support to backup messages when a client is not connected
Allow to specify which messages to retrieve, currently we retrieve all of the messages that they were not delivered
Add support to push notifications, the idea is to provide API such that a user can hook it up with their current firebase or OneSignal credentials. This can be useful in cases of not both chat audience are connected at the same moment.

How to use ws

ws is built with net/http, even for our use cases that was not exactly useful, since we were using gin (noebs). However, you still can use ws even if your http library is not go's stdlib. The way for that is by writing a simple adapter that leverages http.HandlerFunc (which is shared amongst all of them)

Example for gin. This will allow you to use a net/http handler in your gin router, with the help of gin.HandlerFun and c *gin.Context

func previousMessagesAdapter(msg chat.Hub) gin.HandlerFunc {
	return func(c *gin.Context) {
		chat.PreviousMessages(msg, c.Writer, c.Request)
	}
}

How to serve web socket connections

Let's use nginx example, you can find better docs for other web servers.

location /ws {
     proxy_pass http://localhost:6662/ws;
     proxy_http_version 1.1;
     proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
     proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
     proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

This might not be needed, since we do in ServeWs endpoint.

Notes about the database

There's no simple way of using a database.

We are using the awesome migrate library

Just to make our life's easier, we are using the awesome migrate library. You can download simply by go install, using

go install -tags 'sqlite3' github.com/golang-migrate/migrate/v4/cmd/migrate@latest

And then run the command

migrate -path migrations/ -database sqlite3://test.db up

And the directory tree is like the following:

.
├── cli
├── home.html
├── main.go
├── migrate_test.go
├── migrations
│   ├── 000001_create_chats_table.down.sqlite3
│   ├── 000001_create_chats_table.up.sqlite3
│   ├── 000002_add_date_chats.down.sqlite3
│   └── 000002_add_date_chats.up.sqlite3
└── test.db

How to create database migrations

$ migrate create -ext sqlite3 -dir migrations -seq add_date_chats