Rails 6 ActionCable study project

This is a "Chat server" written to learn Rails 6 generally and ActionCable specifically.

Overview

When running the sever it will make a websocket connection available at ws://localhost:3000/cable. The server create a RoomChannel which clients can connect to. It provides a broadcast method which clients can use to create a new message. The message will be broadcasted back to all clients connected.

All communication between the server and the webpage is using websockets. Only one get request is made when retrieving the page.

The study project also includes a client written in Swift. This is the main client - the web client was mainly written to learn how ActionCable works using the javascript features provided by Rails (before attempting to connect to it directly).

Because of this the web client is not fully fledged. It does not auto reconnect if the connection drops.

Message format

All messages are exchanged as json with the following format:

{ "sender": "username", "content": "my message", "color": "#01ad9b" }.

Limitations

The messages are not persisted (due to GDPR concerns). It can be enabled by commenting in a line in the broadcast method. When using the web client to send messages the color and username can not be changed (it is hardcoded to "Tardis" and orange).

Requirements

The project is using rbenv and rbenv-gemset. It is setup to use:

• Rails 6.0.0
• Ruby 2.6.5

Webpack will install the javascript dependencies:

• jQuery
• Handlebars

Usage

Clone the project, install dependencies and run the server

git clone git@github.com:rasmusmaagaard/message_server.git
cd message_server/message_server
bundle install
yarn install --check-files
rails db:migrate
rails server

You should now be able to access the web client at http://localhost:3000 (first page load will be slow because Webpacker needs to compile).

Acknowledgements

The CSS styling is heavily inspired from these codepens:

• ChatBubbles
• Form

Final notes

Also checkout the Swift client

As this is a study project with time constraints there is currently no tests 😱😡😢

Also is has only been tested/run in development mode.

TODO

• Add tests
• Ask for username
• Select color for chat bubbles
• Create docker setup