chatter

A small chat server and application designed to be easily self-hostable by anyone using any free serverless hosting service (e.g., Vercel and Netlify).

Deploying

You will need a PostgreSQL database instance. We use ElephantSQL for a free-tier PostgreSQL database instance, but you can use any PostgreSQL instance you want.

Netlify

chatter officially supports Netlify out of the box. To deploy to Netlify, simply click the button below.

Developing

Before any development, you must have a .env or .envrc file in the root directory of the project. This file must contain these environment variables:

DATABASE_URL="postgres://..."

If you're not in my group (you probably aren't), then you will also need to migrate your database prior to running it:

npm run prisma-reset-prod

BEWARE that this will wipe your database and replace it with the production database. If you're not in my group, you probably don't want to do this.

Running

Do

npm run prisma # only need to run this the first time
npm run dev

Testing

You need npm run dev running on one terminal. On the other, do:

npm run test

Folder Structure

- src
  - components/       -- frontend components
  - pages/
    - api/            -- backend api implementation
    - login/
      - +page.svelte  -- login page
    - register/
      - +page.svelte  -- registration page
    - +layout.svelte  -- layout for all pages
    - +page.svelte    -- main app page for chats