Actionhero Chat Sample Project

Welcome to Actionhero Chat!

When you sign up, you can chat with other users!

This project is a fully-fledged modern application based on Actionhero, React, and Next.JS. It uses Sequelzie as the ORM and connects to Redis and Postgres. This app is deployed automatically to Heroku from the master branch. This project is meant to serve as an example for a more complex Actionhero projects.

This application features:

• Clear Project layout
• Accounts (sign up, sign in, Sessions, CSRF validation)
• Real time chat
• Persistent message storage
• Parallel Testing (unit, action, component, and integration)
• Deployment and Hosting

Overview

This project runs Actionhero, which then in turn hands of processing of the front end to next.js - the project includes the code for both our backend (actionhero) and frontend (next.js).

API

• Actionhero
• Sequelzie and Typescript-Sequelzie via ah-sequelize-plugin
  • Migrations
• typescript tags for model definition
• migrations for database schema management
• Session management via redis and endpoint protection via middleware
• Parallel testing against multiple databases

Front End

• Next.js
• Client-side protection combining session cookies with CSRF protection
• React + Hooks: Functional components and Hooks for API access
• React Bootstrap for responsive pages
• Full browser testing with Jest + Selenium

Running Locally (OSX)

# 1. ensure that postgres and redis are running
brew install postgresql
brew install redis
brew services start postgresql
brew services start redis

#2. create the postgres database
createdb chat_development

#3
npm start # or `npm run dev`

Testing

#1. create the postgres databases (we will run up to 5 tests in parallel)
./api/bin/create_test_databases

#2 Install the Chrome webdriver
# (on OSX)
brew cask install chromedriver

#3. Run the test suite
# we will built the app, run linters, and test the web and api
npm test

Deployment

This project is automatically deployed to Heroku upon changes to the master branch. chat.actionherojs.com hosts the latest version of this codebase. The Procfile determines what processes are run by Heroku.