Create README.md

README.md

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+# Chat-App
+
+A simple demo chat app built on [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/), [Express.js](https://expressjs.com/) and [Socket.io](https://socket.io/).
+
+## Demo
+
+https://diam-node-chat-app.herokuapp.com/
+
+## Pre-requisites
+
+To setup and run the project for local development / testing, you will need to use Node.js and NPM. I don't explicitly specify a minimum Node.js/NPM version for the app but I recommend going with whatever the latest LTS version is at the point in time you are setting things up. 
+
+Installers can be found here: [https://nodejs.org/en/download](https://nodejs.org/en/download/)
+
+Another option for installing Node is the **Node Version Manager** (**nvm**), which is a POSIX-compliant bash script to manage multiple active Node.js versions. Instructions for installing and using nvm to install Node and NPM can be found at [https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm).
+
+## Installation
+
+The code for the chat app can be found at the public [GitHub](https://github.com/) repo [https://github.com/chris-diam/Chat-App](https://github.com/chris-diam/Chat-App). Either clone the repo to a local folder on your machine or download and extract the archive if you don't have [Git](https://git-scm.com/) installed.
+
+Open a terminal window session, or the equivalent on your machine, and enter the following command to install all the Node modules needed to run the app:
+
+```sh
+npm install
+```
+
+## Run the app in development mode
+
+After doing an `npm install` enter the following `npm run` command:
+
+```sh
+npm run dev
+```
+
+This will start the app and set it up to listen for incoming connections on port 3000. Open up your browser of choice and go to the url [http://localhost:3000/](http://localhost:3000/) to start using the app itself. The `npm run dev` command automatically runs the app using the `nodemon` script so any changes you make to the app's javascript, CSS or HTML code will automatically restart it.
+
+## Customizing the listening port
+
+To configure the port that the app listens on at startup, copy the file `.env.example`, located at the root of the project, to `.env` and set an appropriate value for the `PORT` environment variable listed in the file. This must be done before the app is started.