Real-time Scalable Messaging 🚀

🌟 Introduction

FastChat is a high-performance, real-time chat application that demonstrates the power of WebSockets and Redis for scalable messaging. Built with modern web technologies, it offers a seamless chatting experience that can easily scale to handle a large number of concurrent users.

🎯 Features

• ✉️ Real-time messaging using WebSockets
• 👥 Live user connection count across multiple instances using Redis Pub/Sub
• 🚀 Horizontally scalable architecture with multiple backend instances
• ⚖️ Load balancing with Caddy as a reverse proxy
• 🖥️ Sleek, responsive UI built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS
• 🐳 Dockerized for easy deployment and scaling

🛠️ Tech Stack

Backend 🖥️

• ⚡ Fastify: Fast and low overhead web framework
• 🔌 Socket.io: Real-time bidirectional event-based communication
• 🗄️ Redis (Upstash): In-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker
• 🐳 Docker & docker-compose: Containerization and multi-container Docker applications
• 🌐 Caddy: Open source web server with automatic HTTPS

Frontend 🎨

• ⚛️ Next.js: React framework for production-grade applications
• 🎭 Tailwind CSS: Utility-first CSS framework
• 🔗 Socket.io-client: Client-side library for real-time web applications

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or later)
• pnpm || yarn || npm
• Docker and docker-compose
• Redis instance (Upstash account)
• Make (usually pre-installed on most systems)

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/mutasim77/fast-redis-chat.git
   cd fast-redis-chat

2. Set up environment variables:

• Create a .env file in the server directory with:

  UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=rediss://.....

  Replace ... with your actual Upstash Redis URL.

• Create a run.sh file in the server directory and populate it with:

  docker-compose down
  
  export UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=rediss://...
  export CORS_ORIGIN=http://localhost:3000  # or your specific CORS origin
  
  docker-compose -p chat_project up -d --build

  Replace ... in the UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL with your actual Upstash Redis URL.

• Make sure to make the run.sh file executable by running:

  chmod +x run.sh

3. Use the Makefile to install dependencies and run the application:

# Install dependencies for both client and server
make install

# Run both the backend and frontend
make run

# Or simply just run
make all

This will start the backend server using the run.sh script and the frontend development server.

💻 Usage

Once you've run make run or make all:

1. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000
2. Click Start Chatting
3. Start sending messages in real-time!

To stop the application, press Ctrl+C in the terminal where you ran make run. To clean up the project (remove node_modules, etc.), you can run:

make clean  

📸 Preview

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Made with ❤️ by Mutasim