Codeaholics Chatroom¶ ↑

• This is a demo application (for Codeaholics HK meetup) to show how to build up a chat room with security considered.

• It is written in Ruby On Rails with Web Socket communication.

• Web Socket communication channel can be secured by using HTTPS.

Steps to run this application on your machine¶ ↑

1. get your ruby on rails environment setup. I am using Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.

2. download the project

git clone [email protected]:3dd13/codeaholics_chat_room.git

1. go into the project folder

cd codeaholics_chat_room

1. install all the dependencies

bundle install

1. prepare the MySQL database

cp database.yml.sample database.yml 
update database.yml with your mysql login password
rake db:create
rake db:migate

1. start the Rails application

rails s

1. open another terminal, start the Faye service

rackup private_pub.ru -s thin -E production

Dependency projects ¶ ↑

• It is using Faye to provide the publish and subscription service: blog.jcoglan.com/2012/02/27/faye-0-8-the-refactoring/

• Private_Pub is the Ruby Gem to handle the publish and subscription: github.com/ryanb/private_pub

• Another project to do PubSubHub: code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ (not being used in this application, just a reference you want to do Pub Sub Hub)

• It is using MySQL database for the Rails development environment

Run Faye on heroku¶ ↑

basically it is relying on the Procfile to instruct heroku how to start the faye service. Check out the Procfile usage on heroku documentation if you are interested.

Warning ! Do not just use this one version for production use¶ ↑

there are few things you have to do before deploying to production, in order to make sure it is secure. For example,

• you have to change the token in private_pub.yml

• you have to setup HTTPS for the publish and subscribe channel

• you have to change the rails session store key

• …