The goal of this project is to create a collaborative online chat room for multiple users, by learning new technologies like node.js (using packages like socket.io for managing websockets and express for deploying the server) and basic HTML and javascript (using jQuery library) for the client side.
I'm currently using my Raspberry Pi 3 to deploy and host the chat-room, and using it in my local area network to communicate with other people around the house. It works pretty well!
For deploying the server, you will need to install both node.js and npm (node package manager). You can do this very easly by opening a linux terminal and using apt-get:
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
Then, after the installs are complete, download all the required packages with npm and deploy the server using node! You can do that by running the following commands:
npm install
node chatRoom.js
You're good to go now! The next step is to invite some friends and have fun! :)
Here are the used APIs documentation which I followed for this project:
socket.io client API: https://socket.io/docs/client-api/
socket.io server API: https://socket.io/docs/server-api/
express API: http://expressjs.com/en/api.html
jQuery API: https://api.jquery.com/
This is my first time doing anything that looks like web development, so I hold no responsabilities for bad usage or bad practises learnt by reading the code in this repository. That being said, you are 100% free to use it for whatever you need, and I encourage you to learn node.js as it is a growing technology, easy to learn and very powerful.