End to end encrypted chatting application, privacy-focused. No data ultimately resides on our backend database, temporary data is stored so that users can grab a JSON transcript of their chats at any given time, but all data is flushed/deleted upon session termination. Multiple people can join multiple rooms at any given time and see past messages sent in that room. Made with ReactJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS, Socket.IO and MongoDB.
This project was bootstrapped with create-react-app, and uses react-router-dom for routing, react-icons for some pretty icons, react-toastify for error/success prompts, react-scroll-to-bottom for the chat's auto scroll to bottom feature, randomatic for random alphanumeric strings, cors (express middleware) and aes256 for symmetric cryptography (for messages).
Create .env files in base directories of server/ and client/ and punch your own keys inside (cipher, mongodb URI, endpoint). Change the axios request in client/src/components/Chat/Chat.js to reflect your cloud backend server (or localhost:port) and change the proxy in package.json file. I've hosted the frontend on Render (https://render.com), and the backend on Glitch (https://glitch.com) with their generous free tier packages, check them out!
Server resides on
https://puzzling-diamond-barber.glitch.me/
Client resides onhttps://downpour-chat.onrender.com/
Fork this repo and clone it into your local machine. Make sure you have npm installed prior to executing these commands.
cd ./client to go into the client section, which contains the frontend.
npm installto install the dependancies required
npm startto start the app
cd ./server to go into the server section, which contains the backend.
npm installto install the dependancies required
npm startto start the server. Would run on localhost:5000.