Chat App

A chat application built with Flask and PostgreSQL, featuring categories, threads, and messages. Categories contain discussion threads, which consist of messages. Users must be logged in to view and participate in discussions. The app supports both regular users and administrators, with admins having additional privileges like managing categories and creating private categories.

Table of Contents

• Current Progress
• Next Steps
• How to Test
• Features
• Tech Stack
• Database Structure

Current Progress

Visitors are able to register either as an admin or regular user, and log in with the username and password that they created. Possible error messages: username already in use, passwords don't match, incorrect username or password.

After logging in, there is a list of categories that the user has access to, including the amount of threads and messages, as well as the time of last message for each category. Clicking on the category name opens up the category page (not fully done yet). Admins can also see a button for creating a new category.

All users can see their username and role, and log out using the menu at the top right of the page.

Admin users can create a new public or private category.

If they choose to create a private category, they are able to select the users that they want to give access to.

Next Steps

• delete button for categories
• view for a single category
• functionality for adding threads and messages
• editing and deleting threads and messages
• search functionality

How to Test

The app was originally deployed to Fly.io, but due to very unclear pricing, I have taken it down. This means that the app will have to be tested locally.

1. Clone the repository and navigate to the root directory

2. Create a .env file with the following variables, changing the values to your own

DATABASE_URL=postgresql:///yourlocaldatabaseaddress
SECRET_KEY=supersecret

3. Activate Python's virtual environment and install dependencies

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r ./requirements.txt

4. Specify database schema

psql < schema.sql

5. Run the app 🦄

flask run

Features

General User Features

• Create a new account.
• Log in and log out.
• When logged in, view a list of categories, including the number of threads and messages, and the timestamp of the most recent message.
• Create new threads within a category, with a title and initial message content.
• Post messages in existing threads.
• Edit the title of threads they created, the content of their messages, and delete their threads and messages.
• Search for messages containing a given word.

Admin Features

• Add and delete categories.
• Create private categories and specify which users can access them.

Tech Stack

• Backend: Python, Flask
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Frontend: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap
• Other Tools: SQLAlchemy for database ORM, Jinja2 for templating

Database Structure