Slack Clone

The idea behind this project is to be able to create a minimum viable product of a real-time messaging web application using websockets technology, deployed in a real production environment.

• Nginx configured proxy pass to Daphne ASGI and Gunicorn WSGI.
• Redis Channel to manage all websockets layers
• All connections over TLS/SSL.
• CSRF token to avoid middleware attacks.
• Wrapped WebSocket connection over the module AuthMiddlewareStack.
• Using JSON files to make messages perisent in sqlite database

Some screenshots of the app

Login page

Home page

Example chat page

Realtime example

Full video on YouTube SpaceChat

How To Deploy

Clone repository and after change the name of the folder to app/:

$ git clone https://github.com/NgomezKS/Django-message-app-with-Nginx-Daphne-and-Gunciorn

$ ls 
Django-message-app-with-Nginx-Daphne-and-Gunciorn/

$ mv Django-message-app-with-Nginx-Daphne-and-Gunciorn/ app

$ ls 
app/

Put the .sock and .service files from the services/ folder in systemd /etc/systemd/system/ and then run:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

$ sudo systemctl start gunicorn.socket
$ sudo systemctl enable gunicorn.socket

$ sudo systemctl start daphne.service
$ sudo systemctl enable daphne.service

$ sudo reboot

You should also put a script in /etc/init.d to start Redis after a reboot and also to make sure Daphne and Gunciron are working

#! /bin/bash

service gunicron start
service daphne start
docker run -p 6379:6379 -d redis:6.2.3

exit 0

Copy the files from nginx_conf/ to configure the Nginx configuration

$ sudo cp app/nginx_conf/sites-available/spacechat  /etc/nginx/sites-available/spacechat
$ sudo cp app/nginx_conf/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/

$ sudo service nginx restart

Now we activate Python virtual enviroment and generate all static files.

$ source app/spacechat/venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ app/spacechat/manage.py collectstatic

Now you can search https://172.10.10.10/, this is the default user to access.

User: admin 
Password: p4ssword!

To do ideas

• Add support for multiple languages or at least for the most common ones
• Add an complex sistem of levels and permissions
• Add support to send images and videos
• Detect if an user is already logged from another device
• Encrypt messages in the database
• Also encrypt all messages while they are being processed on the server
• Add private chats between users

Im not going to following developing and maintain this project anymore, if you wanna use it be some purpose be free to dot it.

Libraries and documentation used

• Django and Django Channels.
• Nginx conf
• Gunicorn repo
• Redis
• Ddaphne
• Digital Ocean
• and a lot more ....