A simple chat made to experiment with basic networking in Python.

There are two containers, for the server and for the client. Simply build them:

docker-compose build

Containers can be started now. For the server simply do up, for clients, run should be used:

docker-compose up server
docker-compose run --rm client

Several clients can be started.

For the server, only Python 3 is needed. For the client, urwid is needed, as specified in the requirements.client.txt file. It is recommended that a virtual environment is create for it.

Usage of server is:

python src/server.py
python src/server.py -d [ start | stop | restart ]

The first way will simply start the server, the second way to execute will use riftChat server as a daemon.

Client is just

python src/client.py

The protocol is simple. Every message is json. The json always has a code. Depending on that code, it may have other arguments.

Client sends a new message to the server. Every connected user will receive this message.

{"code": 100, "message": "New Message"}

Client changes it's username.

{"code": 101, "username": "New Username"}

New message to be displayed. Sent to all users including the original author of the message.

{"code": 200, "message": chat_msg.getObj()}

State to everyone that a user as connected.

{"code": 201, "new": "New username"}

Give out new username to specific user. Maybe on connection or on username name change.

{"code": 202, "new": "New username"}

State to everyone that a user as changed it's username.

{"code": 203, "old": "Old username", "new": "New username"}

State to everyone that a user as disconnected.

{"code": 204, "username": "Disconnected username"}

State to everyone that the server went down

{"code": 205}