Chat Application Using Socket.io

Hi All, Today I am going to make a simple chat application using socket.io in Node.JS.

Introduction: We’ll be using socket.io for this application so let’s understand what socket.io is?

Socket.io: socket.io is a real-time engine that is reliable and very fast. It’s very popular engine that is used for real-time event-based communication(i.e bidirectional communication between two clients in a browser) in node.js. So, let’s start with creating our first server and establishing socket connection on the server.

The Web Framework: Before we start developing our server, we need a framework. we‘ll be using express framework for this. Make sure express is installed. If not installed, you can easily install by following command:

$ npm install  express

Or if you want to save dependencies you have installed, just run command with --save flag as:

$ npm install  express --save

It will save express as dependency in package.json file.

Step 1:

Create a package.json file that describes your project. To create package.json, open terminal and simply go to project folder(In my case my project folder is socket-chat) and type the following command:

$ npm test

It will populate some basic options (i.e. name, version, description, main license etc) and you have to answer accordingly.
 

In my case, package.json look like:

Step 2: Create a server. Put the following code in a file(server.js):

When you run your server from terminal using following command:

$ node server.js

It will console the following message

Now go to browser and go to “http://localhost:3000/” , You will see Hello World

Step 3: Serving our html file. As now server is created now we need to render some html file where we will send/receive messages. So let’s modify root get request:

We will change it to the following:

After adding my index.html my server will look like:

Step 4: As now server is completed. Now I will integrate socket.io into our server. I’ll continue this part in the next blog.