A self-hosted chat app for small teams.

• BYOS (bring your own server)
• Persistent messages
• Multiple rooms
• New message alerts
• Mentions (hey @you)
• Image embeds
• Code pasting
• File uploads
• SSL/TLS
• MIT Licensed

• API
• Better transcripts with search
• Better error handling
• Emote autocomplete
• Access control
• Mobile client

Install nodejs and mongo

Clone le repo

git clone https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat.git
cd lets-chat

Install node dependencies

npm install

Create a settings file (make sure to edit if you need to).

cp settings.js.sample settings.js

Run the app

node app.js

Party time: http://localhost:5000

Remove settings.js from .gitignore and uncomment the line // db_url: process.env.DATABASE_URL. Be sure to set the DATABASE_URL config variable on heroku to your mongo url. To get your mongo URL, add a mongolab add-on, find its database url config variable, and set the DATABASE_URL to that url. For instance, to do this with the free tier of mongolab on a heroku app called heroku-app-name:

heroku addons:add mongolab -a heroku-app-name
heroku config:set DATABASE_URL=`heroku config:get MONGOLAB_URI -a heroku-app-name` -a heroku-app-name

Additionally, you should set the following config variables from heroku config variables by changing their values to config_var_name: process.env.CONFIG_VAR_NAME and running heroku config:set CONFIG_VAR_NAME=config_var_value -a heroku-app-name:

cookie_secret
password_salt
s3.accessKeyId
s3.secretAccessKey
s3.region
s3.bucket

Note that you must use s3 (or hack in a different solution) to allow file uploads with lets-chat on heroku, as the filesystem is not persisted across heroku deploys.

Finally, be sure to enable heroku's websockets support, otherwise socket.io will fall back to XHR polling and run super slowly.

heroku labs:enable websockets -a heroku-app-name

Now you can push your app to heroku!

git remote add heroku [email protected]:heroku-app-name.git
git push heroku master

You must compile all of your assets and commit them before deploying (TODO: heroku asset pipeline?).