Real-Time Chat App – Microservices Architecture

A project to explore real-time data transfer, WebSockets, and scalable microservice architecture. 
Initially inspired by a full-stack real-time chat application course on Udemy, this project is an advanced, self-built version designed with scalability and DevOps in mind.

MY GOALS
-> Build a scalable real-time chat app using microservices architecture
-> Simulate and handle high traffic locally
-> Integrate modern scalability tools: Redis , RabbitMQ
-> Implement DevOps practices
-> getting comfortable with socket.io
-> Develop an understanding of system scalability patterns


CURRENT FEATURES
-> real time chatting with one to one user
-> online status
->typing indicators
-> side bar updates with latest message from each chat in real time
-> message presistance in mongodb
-> auth using jwt and passport.js
-> password encryption using bcrypt

PROJECT SETUP
-> All microservices are part of a monorepo (for demonstration purposes).
-> clone the repo
-> add .env files to each service and add the following variables

    port = 8080
    dbURI=''
    JWT_SECRET=''

-> start the all services -> docker compose up

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FRONTEND ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The frontend app is in separate repo
-> just clone the app from https://github.com/yogiwoo/chat.git 
-> run via  "npm run dev"

Make sure you ahve docker running
Node version -> 22.18.0

Tech Stack

-> Frontend: React, Bootstrap
-> Backend: Node.js, Express.js
-> Database: MongoDB
-> Real-time: Socket.IO
-> Containerization: Docker, Docker Compose
I Hate frontend