About

This project, originally forked from lighthouse labs ( https://github.com/lighthouse-labs/node-socketio-chat ) is a user forum built for cloud9 workspaces. None of the current code reflects the original fork, however out of respect for others whose interests in education coincide with those of this project, this source will remain as a fork of the lighthouse labs page. Thanks for what you do lighthouse! :-)

Features

The forum includes live chat, submission of categories, topics ( under categories ) and posts under both categories and topics. All content is processed with Remarkable markdown parser ( v1.6.0 https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable ). Some basic langauge highlighting support is included ( mainly what we needed for our own uses ) via Highlight.js - javascript, c, c++, python, java, asm and a couple others. If you need further language support, custom language packs are available here:

https://highlightjs.org/download/

Minimal, front-end, external javascript and css are located the public folder.

Note: As of 4/23/2017 there appears to be a dispute between the owner of the Remarkable github repository and contributors to the project. The version of Remarkable provide with this project is contained in the project so that any future issues regarding the current dispute will not affect the function of the current software. If better options come available, those may be pursued in future releases.

Known Issues

With multiple users/collaborators in a project, sometimes things get left open or different people show up, do stuff then leave. If you run the forum and see a message like:

ECONNREFUSED

OR

ECONN: RESET

Just run this command in the console to restart the mysql server:

sudo service mysql restart

For issues related to the forum software, see https://github.com/EricBalingit/c9-forum-and-chat/issues

Installation

If you are creating a new workspace as a clone of this project, go to your home page and under "Clone from Git or Mercurial URL (optional)" past the link to this repository ( https://github.com/EricBalingit/c9-forum-and-chat ). Configure the other settings as needed and click "Create Workspace".

If you want to clone the project manually into a sub-folder of an existing project, create a folder for the forum ( we use "forum-server" ), open the console ( F6 ) and type the following commands:

cd forum-server
git clone https://github.com/EricBalingit/c9-forum-and-chat .

That last dot is important, it means "install to the current directory". Otherwise the source will end up under forum-server/c9-forum-and-chat.

Once you have imported the source from github, then install the project dependecies:

npm install

First Run Configuration

If this is a new workspace and you have never used mysql in this workspace, use the following command to setup and configure the mysql client:

mysql-ctl install

This will configure your mysql client and output your username and database name ( a database named "c9" is created, but will not be used by the forum ).

Once you have the source code imported and the project dependencies installed you can run the forum server. Open the file server.js and click the Run button. A console will open up and you will see the output of the server log as it boots up. On the first run the log will pause and prompt you to create the database, this will be a yellow, warning prompt. Type y and hit enter to create the database and build the tables for the forum. When that process finishes, in the last 3 or 4 lines of output you will see:

forum-server: server ready!
forum-server: application server running at 0.0.0.0:8080

That's the green light! If you scroll to the top of the output, there will be a link to the external url that will bring you to the forum web page - something like https://<workspacename-username>.c9users.io. Click that link and you will see the forum login page. There will be no user accounts to log into so chose the option at the bottom where it says

Don't have an account? __Signup here__

Updates

When updates to the forum come available, assuming you have no conflicting, custom features written in your workspace, you can simply change to the forum folder from the console then run the command:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/EricBalingit/c9-forum-and-chat
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master

This is the recommended way to update your workspace forum ( even if you have no intention of changing any of the code ), since this will fetch everything from the current release and overwrite onto that any changes you have made to the configuration files. If anything goes wrong, cloning, updating and or deleting all of the code will not affect any of the content in your database ( that stays in your workspace and gets created only as needed and then only ever written to by the forum software ).

So if you try to update and it does not work for any reason, or anything goes terribly wrong with the code, no need to panic, just ask a question on github ( under issues ) or ask on stackoverflow and work through it until the issues are resolved. Then your forum will come back up with all of your content. There will be no breaking changes to the forum software which affect what may be put into or taken out of your database.