Actually it is the chat which we gonna build 😄

Ok, i think it is time to start.

1. Creating the project

The first thing which we need to do is to create Node.js project, go to the folder where you want to do it and just run:

npm init

and follow the instructions to create package.json file.

2. Installing dependencies

Now we have package.json and we can install all needed dependencies.

First, we need to install ClusterWS from this repository:

Just run:

npm install --save clusterws

To handle http / static files and so on we need to use some other framework like Express/ Koa etc. So i am going to use Koa and Koa Static (for static files).

To install run:

npm install --save koa koa-static

The last thing we need to have ClusterWS Client JS library from:

Now create folder public and inside that create another folder assets.

With client library everything is a bit different we actual have 2 ways to install it. First one is to go the the repository and copy ClusterWS.min.js from dist/browser to your public/assets folder.

I will do it another way, will start with installing client library with:

npm install --save clusterws-client-js

And after that navigate to node_modules/clusterws-client-js/browser and copy ClusterWS.min.js to the public/assets folder.

Great we have installed everything and now can start codding. 😃

3. Writing the code 😎

Now start the most interesting part of this whole article.

Will start with creating server.js file in the root of our project with the following code (all description done in comments):

That was pretty simple for the chat server. And yes it is all what we need on the server, all other logic is going to be in the client side.

Now we can build client side, first create index.html file in public folder with the follow code:

Now we need to write main logic for client, to do that create main.js in public/assets folder with:

I hope that code and comments are explaining everything well. 😄

Ok we left only with some styles to make our chat more or less beautiful (unfortunately i was a bit lazy to work with styles so they are not really good), to connect styles just create styles.css in public/assets with:

Now chat should be working fine, you can try by navigating to the root of the project in your terminal and running:

node server.js

You should be able to see blue color text if it is the case, then open it in the browser localhost:yourport (in my case it is localhost:80).

To test it just open localhost in 2 browser windows and try to send message.

I hope you like it. You can find all code in this repository:

Thank you for your time, if liked the article please share it and clap.