meepo-chat

A distributed chat system

Local tests

Run the command below and wait for all the services to initialize.

$ docker compose up

Swarm

Configuring Swarm

Modify .env and .env.chat-server.base according to your needs. Remember to change these variables when deploying to production:

• BACKEND_CORS_ORIGINS
• VITE_MASTER
• JWT_PRIVATE_KEY
• JWT_PUBLIC_KEY

Also consider modifying these variables for security reasons (especially if RabbitMQ or PostgreSQL are going to be available externally):

• RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER
• RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS
• POSTGRES_USER
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD

Remember to update BROKER_URL in .env.chat-server.base when RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER or RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS changes.

See Environmental variables section for more details.

Use the command below to generate a Swarm configuration from the template:

$ docker-compose -f swarm-template.yml config > swarm.yml

Then depending on the docker compose version, you might need to edit swarm.yml and for example:

• insert version: "3.8" line,
• remove name: ... line,
• remove quote characters from the numeric values of published: nodes,
• delete the networks.default and services.front-end.networks nodes.

If the generated swarm.yml file is invalid, docker stack deploy will fail.

Deployment

On the manager node:

$ docker swarm init
$ docker network create -d overlay --attachable meepo-chat-network
$ docker stack deploy -c swarm.yml meepo-chat

On the worker nodes apply the join command printed from previously issued docker swarm init:

$ docker join ...

Choose a Swarm node to serve the main database:

$ docker node ls
$ docker node update --label-add maindb=true <id-of-selected-node>

Deploy a chat server on any Swarm node:

1. Make your own copy of .env.chat-server.example and name it e.g. .env.chat-server.my-server-1

2. Adjust the advertising and server name settings in the copied environmental variables file.

3. Deploy the chat server:

    $ docker compose -f compose-chat-server.yml --env-file .env.chat-server.my-server-1 -p chat-server-my-server-1 up -d
   

Environmental variables

• BACKEND_CORS_ORIGINS – a list of allowed cross origin domains.
• SERVER_NAME – a chat server name.
• MAX_CLIENTS – a maximum number of users in the chat room.
• ADVERTISED_ADDRESS – a published (external) chat server address (IP or domain).
• ADVERTISED_PORT – a published (external) chat server port.
• VITE_MASTER – a master server address (reachable by users).
• JWT_PUBLIC_KEY - an RSA public key used to verify JWT tokens.
• JWT_PRIVATE_KEY – an RSA private key used to sign JWT tokens. Must be kept secret.
• RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER – a default user name for the Message Broker.
• RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS – a default user password for the Message Broker.
• POSTGRES_USER – a default user name for the Main Database server.
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD – a default user's password for the Main Database server.
• POSTGRES_DB – a default database name for the Main Database server.