In this tutorial, we are going to build a realtime chat system with Node.js and the socket.io library.

How do you create a simple chat application?

In this tutorial, I’m going to help you create your own chat application. You can  integrate  into any project! This tutorial help to the complete development of a chat application.

We’re going to be creating a Node.js app, Please make sure you have it installed.

Let’s start :

• create a folder
• cd into that directory in your terminal (command line)
• run npm init . This will create a new package.json file. (it will ask you name/version, etc.)

Node.js as a Web Server

The HTTP module can create an HTTP server that listens to server ports and gives a response back to the client.

Use the createServer() method to create an HTTP server:

var http = require('http');
//create a server object:
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.write('Hello World!'); //write a response to the client
  res.end(); //end the response
}).listen(8080); //the server object listens on port 8080

Getting started with rs-chat plugin

You can install it through npm.

 npm install rs-chat

Setup for nodejs

Open index.js or server.js or main.js file and put the below code and start nodejs server

var app = require('http')
var chat = require('chat')

chat.init({
  host     : 'localhost', // DB host
  user     : 'user', // DB User
  password : 'password', // DB Password
  database : 'database' // DB Name
});

Create table

CREATE TABLE `messages` ( 
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
 `userId` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `toId` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `msg` text NOT NULL,
  `created_at` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `read_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Load the required files

Inside the page’s head tag include the CSS file.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://unpkg.com/rs-chat@1.0.7/dist/rs-chat.min.css">

In the page’s footer, just before </body>, include the required JavaScript files.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/socket.io/2.2.0/socket.io.js"></script>


<script type="text/javascript" href="https://unpkg.com/rs-chat@1.0.7/dist/rs-chat.min.js"></script>

Instantiate the chat plugin

<script type="text/javascript"> 
 RSChat.init({
 socketUrl: 'http://localhost:8080/' // server url,
    userId: '1', // logged in user id
    name: 'ravi shukla', // logged in user name
  });
</script>

Call the below function to open chat box

RSChat.start('user_id', 'username')

if you any error for installation nodejs chat plugin . Please go to git hub link  and download.

Support

If you found a bug please submit it in the Issues.

If you need help with implementing the chat in your project, You can mail me at ravishkl5@gmail.com

Suggestion
If you have any suggestion, You can write mail to me at ravishkl5@gmail.com

This plugin powored by rs-chat